Late last year, astronomers announced that they’d found a super-Earth around Barnard’s star – one of the closest suns to our own. The discovery of a planet just six light-years away was enough to excite astronomers and the public alike. However, the researchers who found the planet said that they suspected the icy world couldn’t support life.

But now, a group of astronomers are saying such pessimism may be premature. On Earth, geothermal vents produce heat and create unique environments where life thrives in places otherwise difficult to eke out a living – like the frigid, dark deep of the oceans. The team says similar processes could be at work on this world, which is officially cataloged as Barnard b.

Barnard’s star is a low-mass red dwarf , which means it’s small, ancient, and only emits a fraction of the energy our sun puts out. The planet itself is about three times the mass of Earth and orbits the star every 233 days. So, because of its distant orbit around a tiny star, the planet should be a pretty frigid place where water would freeze on the surface.

But what about the water below the surface? On Thursday morning at the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, a team of astronomers rekindling the planet’s potential for habitability. They said that if the world also has a large iron/nickel core and enough geothermal activity, features such as volcanic plumes and vents could create “life zones” of liquid water under the world’s frozen surface.