Sciencio.com

Subscribe in a reader Spider Webs: Wonderful Architecture Rats Used To Detect Land Mines And To Diagnose Tuberculosis Russia Is Aiming To It's Own GPS-like System NASA invited Twitter fans to watch space shuttle Atlantis launch in November

European astronomers yesterday found 2 planets that are very similar to Earth.

They said that they found smallest exoplanet ever called Gliese 581 e and after that they realized that neighboring planet which is discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d is in right place for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the habitable zone", said Michel Mayor from Geneva University in Switzerland.

Exoplanet Gliese 581 e is just 1,9 times bigger than Earth and it is too close to the nearest star to expect to find some life on it, but it's neighboring planet Gliese 581 d is in the "habitable zone" - a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.

Those two newly discovered planets are about 1/2 light years away from Earth.