The next closest Earth-sized planet around a red dwarf is located 127 light-years away – too far for scientists to characterize the planet.
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Astronomers have described the new world as “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system”. Scientists have determined that these kinds of stars are frequently orbited by planets, but they haven’t yet found Earth-sized exoplanets that are close enough to study in depth.
The most earth-like planet has been found in outer space.
As a result, GJ 1132b is baked to a temperature of about 450 degrees Fahrenheit. And it orbits very close.
One day on Venus lasts as long as 243 Earth days. “So we think this planet probably still has something of a substantial atmosphere in its current state”, Dr Berta-Thompson said.
“What is tremendously exciting to me is that this planet could be a real “cousin” of Venus and Earth”.
However, the astronomers warn that it is now impossible to draw any firm conclusions about what the planet’s atmosphere is like. This, combined with the star’s close distance, makes it easier to detect and study any planetary atmosphere, should one exist.
“The planet is very hot, hotter than Venus”, said Berta-Thompson.
‘The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it’s like burnt-cookie hot.
The reason for these toasty temperatures is because GJ 1132b sits just 1.4 million miles from its host star – 26 times closer than Mercury is to our Sunday.
“GJ 1132b is too warm to be habitable, but scientists have yet to fully explore our cosmic neighbourhood for worlds that potentially harbour life”, he notes in an accompanying article in Nature.
“If this planet still has an atmosphere, then we might find other, cooler planets that also have atmospheres and orbit small stars”.
Either Hubble or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope set for launch in 2018, will hopefully show us which chemical compounds are in the planet’s atmosphere – a major step towards understanding whether the atmospheres of similar worlds just a little further from their stars could be hospitable to life.
M-dwarf stars are hydrogen-burning stars that are less than 60 per cent of the size of our sun and are the most common class of star in our galaxy.
Astronomers estimate the star which the new planet is orbiting is around 21 per cent the size of our own Sunday.
“This planet is going to be a favorite target of astronomers for years to come”, lead study author Zachory Berta-Thompson of the MA Institute of Technology said in a statement Wednesday.
Planets exert a slight gravitational pull on their host stars, causing them to wobble.
The next nearest rocky Earth-sized planets to be discovered are around 127 light years away.
Based on the amount of starlight the planet blocks and the radius of the star, scientists calculated that planet GJ 1132b is about 1.2 times the size of Earth.
The planet also has an Earth-like gravity and someone standing on the surface of the planet would weigh around 20 per cent more than they do on Earth.
“We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere too, and if it does we can’t wait to get a whiff”, said Dr. David Charbonneau, an astronomer from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We hope to learn about how the planet got its atmosphere in the first place”, he says “and how the atmosphere may have been sculpted over billions of years of evolution”. Berta-Thompson discovered GJ 1132b with his team of MIT and Harvard University researchers in May, and their findings were published Wednesday in the science journal Nature. It orbits a red dwarf star that’s about a fifth the size of the sun, and several times dimmer.
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Since the beginning of past year, the telescope array has been gathering data virtually every night, taking measurements of light in the sky every 25 minutes in search of the telltale star dimming that may indicate that a planet is orbiting in front of a star.
