Gliese 667Cc: A new ‘Super-Earth’ basking in the light of three Suns

Astronomers announce with excitement the latest exoplanet found to be orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. In addition, the newly discovered Gliese 667Cc is a member of a very unique orbital system. Its parent star, the red dwarf Gliese 667C itself orbits a binary system of two K-type stars, Gliese 667A & B at an enormous distance roughly equivalent to 6 times that between the Sun and the dwarf planet Pluto. Accordingly, the distant binary system, whilst bound gravitationally, has no affect over the planetary environment of Gliese 667Cc, nicknamed ‘Vulcan’ by astronomers after the triple-star system home to Star Trek‘s Spock. I’m not much of a sci-fi fan, despite my interest in all things exoplanet, so I’ll stick to an shortened ‘Cc‘ for brevity.

Habitability

The Gliese 667C system revolves around a M1.5V red dwarf, a small star only 31% as massive as the Sun and much less luminous, located 22 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. The habitable zone extends from 0.11 AU out to 0.23 AU, well within the orbit of Mercury if superimposed onto the Solar System.  Cc has a minimum mass equivalent to roughly 4.5 Earths and orbits at 0.12 AU, straddling the inner edge of the habitable zone. Accompanying Cc in orbit is Gliese 667Cb, a large (5.7 Earth masses) planet nestled at 0.05 AU, and possibly another planet of equal mass, dubbed Gliese 667Cd, at 0.24 AU.

Gliese 667 Cc performed very well in a habitability assessment undertaken by the Habitable Exoplanet Catalog (HEC), ranking as the planet with the greatest habitability potential of all discovered exoplanets to date:

Habitability assessment of Gliese 667Cc by the Habitable Exoplanet Catalog (information and graphics by HEC, 2012)

Figures in red are subject to large uncertainty, and will only be refined with more detailed observation. A quick refresher of the HEC metrics in the context of Cc: ESI is the ‘Earth Similarity Index’  and consists of several planetary characteristics, namely radius, density, escape velocity, and surface temperature that are used to determine the relative similarity of the planet to Earth on a scale from 0 (completely dissimilar) to 1 (identical). An ESI 0f 0.82 represents an ‘Earth-like’ world, but the large mass (5.2 as the mean expected mass) of Cc has negatively affected this value.

SPH is the Standard Primary Habitability, a measure (from 0 to 1), calculated from surface temperature and humidity, of the ability of the planet to support terrestrial primary producers. In the case of SPH, Cc outranks even the Earth! Its position half-way between the very centre of habitable zone and its inner edge, represented here by the metric HZD, means that it is extremely favourable to supporting a ecosystem of primary producers similar to those on Earth. However, as a red dwarf, Gliese 667C emits much of its radiation in the red, near-infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Red dwarfs like Gliese 667C are also known to be more variable and prone to flaring.  The affect of this shift in wavelength would have very negative repercussions for Earth-based photosynthetic mechanisms which utilise visible light, but the possibility of photosystems evolved to exploit lower-energy NIR/IR radiation is hypothetically possible.

Other values to note are the comfortable planetary temperature of 29 °C, large mass and somewhat more suppressive gravity. A year on Cc lasts 28 days. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to determine whether Cc is a rocky, watery or gas planet without an accurate measurement of its size, a parameter still unavailable at this stage. The effects of a possible atmosphere cannot be accounted for just yet but a thick greenhouse of water vapour, carbon dioxide or methane would elevate the planetary temperature beyond that considered habitable.

Lack of public interest

So it seems that Cc  is the new champion of the habitable planet competition being held by scientists on Earth, and the evidence seems to back up their claims. Why then the lack of public interest? Outside of popular science websites and publications, news of this new planetary utopia is hard to find. Contrast the scarcity of coverage with the hype surrounding Kepler 22b two months ago, and I fear the predictions I made in these posts may have come to fruition. The wider public is bored; they’ve heard it all before and become desensitised our disinterested. Kepler 22b is habitable, so is Gliese 581d and now so is Gliese 667Cc. It’s disappointing, but inevitable, that the furore of excitement surround these planet discoveries wasn’t sustainable. The thing is, we still haven’t stumbled across the perfect Earth analogue, a replica of our watery, rocky globe. Yet. We will do, and when this day comes and the discovery is announced, I fear the room may be empty save for a few dedicated science correspondents that realise the very real implication of finding a planet like this.

Update (08/02)

It seems that in my haste to bemoan the lack of mainstream press coverage of Cc, I neglected to detect the underlying politics of the announcement. The main reason that Kepler 22b attracted so much more attention is that Cc was not announced by NASA. The NASA PR machine is an effective beast. Also, the discovery of Gliese 667Cc was first announced last November by a European team of astronomers led by Xavier Bonfils from Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. However, it’s confirmation came yesterday from an international team lead by two American astronomers, Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institute for Science. Cc‘s discoverer is therefore under debate.

The coverage of Gliese 667Cc also seems to suffer from a somewhat of a geographical disconnect. Daniel Fischer, who runs the excellent ‘The Cosmic Mirror‘ site, notes that the coverage of Cc has been extensive in his native Germany because of Anglada-Escudé’s link with the University of Göttingen. Parodies and further analysis can be found here and here, respectively (in German – thanks Google Translate!).

It seems that the story of Gliese 667Cc is far from over.