An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of three exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars. That’s pretty exciting alone, but the closest is just 17 light years away.

They were found during analysis of archive data from two instruments — the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) and High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), both operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Both instruments look for tiny wobbles in a star’s position caused by the orbit of planets around it.

The team found eight new worlds orbiting red dwarf stars (which make up at least three quarters of the stars in the Universe), three of which were in the habitable zone — the region where temperatures could allow for liquid water, making life more likely. The habitable candidates were Gliese 180c, thirty-eight light years away, Gliese 422b, forty-one light years away, and Gliese 682b, just seventeen light years away. The team also plans to follow up ten weaker signals.

They also found that the average red dwarf star has at least one near-Earth-sized planet, and one in four has one in the habitable zone. “According to our results, M dwarfs have very high rates of hosting systems of low-mass planets around them, and have a high probability of being hosts to super-Earths in their habitable zones,” wrote Mikko Tuomi, who led the study. “This makes them primary targets for searches of Earth-like planets, and possibly life.”