An Earth like world orbiting in the habitable zone of a distant star has been discovered by planet hunters at the University of California. It is the first exoplanet found which may possibly harbor life.

The NASA sponsored project found the planet after more than decade of research using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The findings are yet to be confirmed but scientists are hopeful that this could be the first “Earth like” planet ever discovered.

The planet which has three times the mass of Earth orbits around the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which is comparatively close to Earth, being only 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra. It orbits the star every 37 days with a mass that suggests it is a rocky planet with sufficient gravity to keep its atmosphere.

Six planets have now been detected around Gliese 581, two of which lie just outside its habitable or “Goldilocks zone” as it is known, the newly discovered Gliese 581g however orbits right in the middle.

The planet is tidally locked meaning that the same side is always facing its sun, leaving one side in constant daylight and the other in constant darkness. According to Professor Steven Vogt at UC Santa Cruz this would stabilize the planet's surface climates.

To date almost 500 planets have been discovered outside of our solar system, Professor Vogt stated that "The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20%, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number".

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