US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Recently, astronomers have discovered a new planet – the so-called Super-Earth. Such findings are moving closer and closer scientists to the discovery of alien life.
An exoplanet resembling Earth is close to the center of its galaxy. The planet is one of those few whose size and orbit are comparable to our planet. Here’s what the astronomer, Ph.D. Antonio Herrera Martin, lead author of a new study from the University of Canterbury, said on this occasion:
“To have an idea of how rare this discovery is, it’s worth saying that it took five days to increase the brightness of the host star, and the planet itself was discovered during a small five-hour distortion.”
“After confirming that this distortion was really caused by the presence of another body,” and not an instrumental error, we proceeded to obtain the characteristics of the star-planet system.”
It turned out that the host star is about 10 percent of the mass of our Sun, and the planet itself has a mass somewhere between the mass of the Earth and Neptune. Moreover, this celestial body has an orbit in the so-called habitable zone.
Due to the fact that the host star has less mass than our Sun, the year on the discovered planet will last about 617 days. This planet is only one of the few in the range of discovered planets that has an orbit and a size approximately similar to the parameters of planet Earth.
Dr. Herrera Martin also noted that the planet was discovered using a method known as gravitational microlensing:
“The combined gravity of the planet and its host star has led to a special increase in light from a more distant background star. “We used telescopes around the world to measure the effect of bending light.”
The microlensing method extremely rarely brings the desired result, since at any given time only one in a million stars affects the galaxy. In addition, this type of observation is not repeated, and the probability of simultaneous capture of the planet is extremely small.
The specified specific microlensing event was observed during 2018 and was designated as OGLE-2018-BLG-0677.
An extraordinary find was independently discovered during an optical gravity licensing experiment using a telescope in Chile and the Korean Micro Lens Telescope Network (KMTNet).
The team used three identical telescopes in Chile, Australia and South Africa to find the above exoplanet. KMTNet telescopes are equipped with very large cameras, which the team uses to measure luminous flux from one hundred million stars every 15 minutes.
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