New Planet 100 Light Years Away That Might Be Suitable for Life: NPR

SPECULOOS Southern Observatory telescopes in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Telescopes were used to confirm and characterize a new planet discovered by NASA, which led to the discovery of another nearby planet.

ESO / P.Holárek

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ESO / P.Holárek

SPECULOOS Southern Observatory telescopes in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Telescopes were used to confirm and characterize a new planet discovered by NASA, which led to the discovery of another nearby planet.

ESO / P.Holárek

An international team of scientists says it did Two new “super-Earths” planets have been discovered about 100 light-years away, and one of them may be suitable for life.

Unlike any of the planets in our solar system, approximately 1,600 planets are known super earth Bigger than Earth, but lighter than icy planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Researchers at the University of Liege, Belgium announced Wednesday They found another one While using ground-based telescopes to confirm the existence of a different planet, it was initially discovered by a NASA satellite in the same solar system.

NASA’s satellite found LP 890-9b, which is about 30% larger than Earth and orbits its sun in just 2.7 days. ULiège researchers used speculus (Search for habitable planets beyond ULtra-cOOl stars) in Chile and Spain for a closer look at the planet with high-resolution cameras.

That’s when stargazers discovered another planet, LP 890-9c (the ULiège researchers renamed it SPECULOOS-2c), which is 40% larger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit the sun.

Francisco Puzuillos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia and one of the paper’s co-lead authors, said in a press release that the planet could be suitable for life despite being only 3.7 million miles from the sun. For comparison, Earth is located more than 93 million miles from our sun.

“Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than Mercury around our sun, the amount of stellar radiation it receives is still low, and could allow liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface, provided it is in an atmosphere Enough,” Pozuelos said. “This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and its surface temperature is half that of our star.”

NASA agency Transiting a satellite to survey the outer planets TESS searches for exoplanets orbiting nearby stars by observing the light levels of thousands of stars. New planets are discovered when a planet passes in front of one of those stars, causing the observed light to dim.

ULiège scientists then follow up on NASA’s findings using ground-based telescopes to confirm and characterize the planets.