Hark! Three habitable planets found in our neighborhood

Thought to have the potential for liquid water, the three planets are close to Gliese 667C, a star about 22 light-yea

A team of scientists has discovered three potentially habitable planets in an area just beyond our solar system's back yard.

According to a press release by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today, the astronomers found a group of six planets in the vicinity of a star known as Gliese 667C, at least three of which were termed "super-Earths" because conditions could support liquid water.

Located about 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius, Gliese 667C is a star about a third the size of our sun, and is part of a triple-star system known as Gliese 667. Previous studies of the system had identified three planets, just one of which was thought to be potentially habitable. But the new study, conducted using the ESO's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a high-precision echelle spectrograph that was added to the ESO's 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, as well as data provided by the ESO's Very Large Telescope, the Magellan Telescopes, and the W.M. Keck Observatory, suggest that those earlier numbers were significantly short of the potential reality.