Astronomers have discovered habitable planet in constellation Libra

A decadelong hunt by an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz has yielded the discovery of a planet that could be the most Earth-like planet ever discovered -- and the best case yet for a habitable one, ending our cosmic loneliness.

The planet, called Gliese 581g, is located in prime real estate within the constellation Libra, where it's sweater weather, not too windy, with scenic views of a white sky.

Scientists say there is no evidence that Gliese 581g holds oxygenated landscapes of green and blue that would support microbes, dinosaurs or some alien-looking pre-human. For life, there must be water, and there's no proof of that, according to San Jose Mercury News.

"Our find­ings of­fer a very com­pel­ling case for a po­ten­tially hab­it­a­ble plan­et," said as­tron­o­mer Ste­ven Vogt of the Uni­vers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia San­ta Cruz, one of the re­search­ers. "The fact that we were able to de­tect this plan­et so quickly and so near­by tells us that plan­ets like this must be really com­mon... there could be tens of bil­lions of these sys­tems in our ga­laxy."

The plan­et is be­lieved to or­bit closely by the "red dwarf" star Gliese 581. It would be in the mid­dle of the star's "hab­it­a­ble zone"-the range of dis­tances from the star where tem­pe­r­a­tures al­low for liq­uid wa­ter, World Science reports.