A Newly Discovered Planet Cosmo
Scientists have found two rocky exoplanets – non much larger than Earth – orbiting a star so close to us that they are practically in our solar arrangement'due south lawn.
The star, HD 260655, is a low-mass G-class star, a type known as a blood-red dwarf, about 33 light years abroad. The discovery was announced past Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Espana, at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Gild in the U.s.a..
To put that distance into perspective, 33 light years is so close that if you constructed a calibration model of the milky way, in which the Sun was in Pasadena (site of the meeting) and HD 260655 was in neighbouring Hollywood (18km away), then the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way) would be somewhere around Nepal.
That's important because it puts the two new planets close plenty to us to make them prime number targets for the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope.
Read also: Spotted: a Tatooine-like exoplanet orbiting two stars
The planets were first observed in belatedly 2021, when NASA'southward planet-hunting infinite telescope TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) spotted them passing between us and their star, causing its light to dim every bit they eclipsed a portion of it.
That was interesting enough, but when Luque's team looked dorsum at prior observations of the same star from telescopes on Earth, they found that its motion appeared to wobble as information technology was tugged alternately toward and away from us – exactly what would happen if it was existence affected by the gravity of orbiting planets. That wobble hadn't been strong enough to warning scientists to the presence of the planets at the fourth dimension, merely combined with the TESS observations, it was a smoking gun.
Better however, Luque says, combining the TESS data (which gave the diameter of the ii planets by the degree to which they blocked their sunday's low-cal) with the wobble data (which revealed their masses), information technology was possible to summate their density. "We institute that these planets, despite being slightly larger than the Earth, have a density pretty similar to ours," he says.
This means they aren't h2o worlds or gas-dominated worlds like those in our own outer solar system. "Both are consistent with having a composition consistent with rocks," Luque says.
Not that this means they are twins of Earth, let alone suggests that they can back up life as we know information technology. The one nearest to its star might exist nearly equally hot as Venus, and the other might still have a surface temperature as high as 284°C.
Read as well: What tin can chewed-up exoplanets tell us about exo-geology?
Just fifty-fifty if they show to be also hot for complex life, they are important targets for study because they might teach us more than about a truly Earthlike world, once we find ane at the correct distance from its star. "Both are ranked among the 10 best targets to look at," Luque says.
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A Newly Discovered Planet Cosmo,
Source: https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/two-nearby-newly-discovered-exoplanets-mirror-earth/
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