Researchers have found two new planets orbiting around one of the oldest stars near Sun called Kapteyn and one of them may support life.
Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude, from QMUL's School of Physics and Astronomy said that it was astounding finding those planets orbiting Kapteyn's star, although previous data did show some moderate excess of variability, so they were looking for very short period planets when the new signals showed up loud and clear.
According to the findings the planet Kapetyn b is at least five times as massive as the Earth and it orbits the star every 48 days making it warm enough for liquid water to be present on its surface and the second planet, Kapteyn c is a more massive and quite different; its year lasts for 121 days and astronomers think it's too cold to support liquid water.
Jacobus Kapteyn discovered the star at the end of the 19th century belonging to the galactic halo and it is the second fastest moving star in the sky.
With a third of the mass of the sun, this red-dwarf can be seen in the southern constellation of Pictor with an amateur telescope.
The astronomers used new data from HARPS spectrometer at the ESO's La Silla observatory in Chile to measure tiny periodic changes in the motion of the star. Using the Doppler Effect, which shifts the star's light spectrum depending on its velocity, the scientists can work out some properties of these planets, such as their masses and periods of orbit.
