It was fun while it lasted, right? All of that talk of giving up on Earth and just starting over again with a new planet, some 20 light years away. Hopefully you didn’t burn any irreparable bridges late last month when scientists announced the existence of Gliese581g, a so-called “Goldilocks” planet that was theoretically the right size and distance from the sun to potentially support human life.
Turns out that Gliese581g may actually just be a whole lot of noise–quite literally, in fact. During a meeting of the International Astronomical Union this week, Geneva-based astronomer Francesco Pepe questioned the existence of the planet, stating, “despite the extreme accuracy of the instrument and the many data points, the signal amplitude of this potential fifth planet is very low and basically at the level of the measurement noise.”
Pepe isn’t willing to rule out the possibility that the existence of the “planet” is, in fact, just an error. “Simulations on the real data have shown that the probability that such a signal is just produced ‘by chance’ out of the noise is not negligible, of the order of several percents,” he told the organization. “Under these conditions we cannot confirm the presence of the announced planet Gliese 581g.”
In the meantime, I’d hold off from destroying our own planet as much as possible–you know, just in case…
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