A telescope perched high atop a Chilean mountain recently got a peak of something amazing. It discovered a planet orbiting a small red star. Why was it amazing? Because it’s the first planet we have discovered that fits the “goldilocks” definition for life – it’s not too cold and it’s not too hot. It appears to house the conditions necessary for supporting liquid water. If it has water, it has the potential to host life.

The significance is not actually that it meets the conditions necessary to support life – Mars fits that description – but that it’s a planet orbiting another star. Not only that, it’s a star that is about as far away from Earth as Westbank is from Kelowna, astronomically speaking. It’s a mere 20.5 light years, or 120 trillion miles away. The planet has been given the catchy name of “581 c” because it orbits the red dwarf star called Gliese 581.

Gliese 581 is one of the hundred closest stars to us. It’s called a red dwarf because it’s, well, small and red. Because it’s so small, the planet 581 c is much, much closer to it’s star than we are to the Sun. Like Earth, however, it’s located in the thermal sweet spot where it’s warm enough to have liquid water, but not hot enough for the water to all evaporate as steam. The real kicker is the potential for other life-sustaining planets in the universe. If we’ve found one this close, odds are there are many, many, many more of them out there.

Let me try to put this in perspective for you. The star we orbit, the Sun, is located in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains about 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) stars, give or take a trillion. But we ten trillion stars are not alone out here – there are about ten trillion other galaxies in our universe, all containing trillions of stars. The best current guesses, based on data from the Hubble telescope, is that there are a whole lot of stars out there. How many? So many I won’t even type out the number. Google doesn’t even have a name for a number that large. Picture a 10 with 24 zeros following it. That’s how many stars are out there. So think about the fact that we’ve found a planet with seemingly good conditions for life less than a hundred stars away from here. Now think about, if you can possibly wrap your mind around the immensity of it all, how many other planets might exist in that 10-with-24-zeros-following-it group of stars. Probably a whole lot. Do any of them contain Vulcans or Wookies or little green men? I don’t know, but I think the odds of there being some kind of life out there just got a whole lot better.

Bear in mind that “life” could simply be some kind of microscopic single-celled organism. But if we find one single-celled organism on one planet, there could be 10-with . . . Tell you what, you can do the math on that one. My head hurts.