Wired is bursting a few bubbles by reporting that Gliese 581g – the first habitable planet discovered around another star – may not exist at all:
Two more planets, including the supposedly habitable 581g, appeared when astronomers Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington added data from the HIRES spectrograph on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. They announced their discovery Sept. 29.
Just two weeks later, the HARPS team announced they found no trace of the planet in their data, even when they added two more years’ worth of observations. But it was still possible that the planet was only visible using both sets of data.
Now, the first re-analysis of the combined data from both telescopes is out, and the planet is still missing.
“I don’t find anything,” [statistics expert Philip Gregory of the University of British Columbia] said. “My analysis does not want to lock on to anything around 36 days. I find there’s just no feature there.”