“The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it’s like burnt-cookie hot”.
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“This planet is going to be a favorite target of astronomers for years to come”, he said in a statement.
Much like our own planet, the new planet is rocky.
Theres a new rocky Earth-size planet on our galactic block, and its a sizzler. Planet GJ 1132b, however, is cool enough to have a rich atmosphere.
‘Our galaxy spans about 100,000 light-years, ‘ Berta-Thompson says.
The newly discovered galactic neighbour is around 1.2 of Earth’s radius and weighs about 1.6 times as Earth with nearly same density of Earth.
As a outcome, only large planets – equivalent in size to our Neptune, or bigger – have betrayed information about their atmospheres. On the other hand, other “planets in the solar system seem to be a dime a dozen. It receives about 20 times as much energy as the Earth receives from the Sun”.
Because it’s so close to its star, GJ 1132b has an estimated surface temperature of around 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
Venus, often considered Earth’s “sister-planet” is also too hot to be inhabitable at 864 F, and has thick, dense atmosphere. The reason the planet is exciting is because it could once have been Earth-like. The powerful telescopes detected a miniscule change in starlight as the planet orbited around its host star, a small red dwarf.
“This is maybe the first rocky exoplanet we can really characterise in the next decade”, says Rory Barnes of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was so excited about the findings, published this week in Nature, that he described the new world as “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system” in an accompanying News and Views article.
Unlike the planets in the recent deluges of Kepler data-whose potential for follow-up are vague and years off in the future- GJ 1132b is uniquely suited for immediate investigation.
The amount the star wobbled due to GJ 1132b’s gravity was used to calculate the planet’s mass to be about 62 per cent greater than that of Earth. The dips indicate that a planet is passing in front of the star.
However, these are not so interesting as small rocky planets, which are far more likely to have a broader range of gases relevant to life. Adding to its charms, it circles a relatively small, faint star called a red dwarf. Density is the most important measurement because it shows what a planet is made of.
“If somebody hands you a birthday present or any wrapped package, you pick it up and you shake it”, explains Berta-Thompson. “You feel how heavy it is to get a sense of what it is”.
Other exoplanets live closer to us than GJ 1132b, but this one is a golden combination of very close and very similar in size to Earth.
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What is intriguing scientists most is its proximity to Earth, which means it could be far easier to learn more about its characteristics, from the composition of its atmosphere to the pattern of its winds and the color of its sunsets. One of those is that we’re looking at the star as it is right now to see if there are any more planets orbiting around it. One of the things we’ve learned is that if the star has one planet around it, it probably has more planets around it as well. It is also possible for the planet to have siblings.
