New, Life-Sustaining Planet May Not Exist

US-based researchers may have gotten a tad carried away when they announced the discovery of a new, potentially life-sustaining planet a couple weeks back. Yesterday, a team of Switzerland-based astronomers said their own observations of star Gliese 581g didn’t back up the American team at all. “We do not see any evidence for a fifth planet,” astronomer Francesco Pepe told ScienceNow.

The team also said that, if they were forced to draw a conclusion from their data, they would get a negative signal, which implies that the planet isn’t there, not that they just haven’t been able to find it, notes Steinn Sigurðsson on his blog. Meanwhile, a member of the US team admits that more data is necessary to confirm Gliese 581g’s existence. “I would expect that on the time scale of a year or two, this should be settled.” (More Gliese 581g stories.)