WHAT IS THE ‘GOLDILOCKS ZONE’?

All forms of life that we know of depend on one critical component: liquid water. So, in the search for life, astronomers focus on planets where liquid water could exist. As such, every star has a ‘Goldilocks Zone’, where a planet gets just the right amount of energy from the star to support liquid water. Any closer to the star, and water would boil; any further out and it would freeze. However, this doesn’t guarantee that liquid water would exist on a planet in the Goldilocks Zone. The planet’s atmosphere could be too thick, for example, raising the temperature too high.