(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers, as part of the CARMENES project, designed to search for exoplanets in nearby red dwarf systems, has discovered a potentially habitable planet.
The intrigue of the discovery is added by the fact that the new world is comparable in size to the Earth and is located relatively close to our planet.
The newly discovered exoplanet is located in the so-called habitable zone of its star, that is, it may have the conditions necessary to maintain liquid water on the surface.
The planet is located in the constellation Cygnus, just 31 light years away. Note that this is very close by cosmic standards.
The world was hard and rocky. In addition, in its parameters it is comparable to our planet. So, its mass is 1.36 Earth masses.
The new world was named Wolf 1069b because it orbits the star Wolf 1069.
The latter, like the planet, was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Diana Kosakowski from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
It is already known that the exoplanet makes one revolution around its star in about 15.5 Earth days. But unlike the Earth, on one of its sides day always reigns, and on the other – night.
Being in the so-called habitable zone is already the first step in narrowing down the question of whether a newly discovered world can be hospitable to life, the authors of the study say.
Not in favor of the habitability theory is the fact that the planet Wolf 1069b is located very close to its star – only 0.2 astronomical units, and one astronomical unit is equal to the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
With such proximity, as astronomers note, an extremely high temperature could be kept on the surface of the planet, at which the existence of life is impossible. So it would be if the star Wolf 1069 was similar to our Sun.
But it is much smaller and colder than our star. This means that the habitable zone of the Wolf 1069 system is located much closer to its star than in our solar system (our habitable zone extends from Venus to Mars).
Scientists also calculated that although Wolf 1069b is much closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, the radiation it receives is only about 65 percent of what the Earth receives from the Sun.
This means that the surface temperature of Wolf 1069b is about minus 23 degrees Celsius. In our opinion, it is too cold for the existence of liquid water.
But astronomers note that the planet may have an atmosphere, data on which are not yet available.
And the existence of an atmosphere can change ideas about the key parameters necessary for life, including the temperature on the surface of the newly discovered world.
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