The Low Down
- A new planet that's the right size and location for celebrity life has been discovered 20 light-years away.
- The newly discovered world exists in a solar system and is believed to have characteristics very similar to Palm Springs roughly 30 years ago.
- Celebrities with lots of money are already eying it as possibly the next isolated beach vacation hang out.
This illustration offers a glimpse of the Gliese 581 system from the perspective of ET - Entertainment Tonight
A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Getting Away From God-Darn Paparazzi.
Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for celebrity life.
"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity for life forms to believe other life forms are gods and for paparazzi to flourish in that environment wherever they can, unfortunately I would say that the chances for supercilious selfish assholes on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it. I is just a matter of time" Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.
The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes to see up, down, or through red carpet celebrity dresses. The technology has only recently been used to measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. It was an accident.
Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface. Like Palm Springs was some time in the past, celebrities are hoping this can be a place they can frolic in water without paparazzi all over them.
"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday. In all seriousness, somewhat overweight, with clearly unwashed rumbled clothing and taped dark black glasses he awkwardly exclaimed, "Everything we know about celebrities (and life in general) is that they absolutely require liquid water!" he added. "The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it's not too hot, not too cold... and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool." While that is nice, ET reporters are more concerned about how soon we can get Camron Diaz into that water.
