The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has announced the discovery of 50 planets orbiting other stars. Amongst the haul are 16 super-Earths which are planets which have a mass of up to 10 times more than Earth and amongst these are 5 “light” super-Earths which have a mass less than 5 times the Earth.

One of these super-Earths is thought to orbit in the habitable zone of a sun like star, this is a region where the temperature would allow liquid water to flow. The planet which has been named HD 85512b has only around 3.5 times the mass of Earth, making it the smallest planet ever detected in the habitable zone.

If HD 85512b is indeed a rocky planet with at least 50 percent cloud cover it could possibly provide a habitable environment. Scientists at the ESO believe many more super-Earths will be discovered, providing ideal candidates for study by future powerful telescopes looking for similar atmospheres to our own and signs of life.

The discoveries were made using the ESO’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher spectrograph or HARPs for short. The instrument is able to detect tiny shifts in the star’s spectrum as it “wobbles” due to it’s interaction with an orbiting planet. All of the ESO’s observatories are based in northern Chile.

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