Zone 9 in Outer Space

The Known Habitable Zones & One Remarkable Planet

I constantly tell my Facebook and Twitter followers to beware of the claims of popular science web articles. Let me give you an example. Last July, Yahoo News ran an article titled "Astronomers Say We Could Be Just 10 Years Away from Finding Alien Life."¹ But what one of the authors of the research paper, Julien de Wit, actually said was, "In five to ten years we will be able to say if they [two of the extrasolar planets they were studying] are habitable."² By habitable, de Wit and his coauthors meant whether or not either of the two planets possessed properties that would allow liquid water to exist on part of the planet's surface for at least part of the...