The telescopes of the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory within the Atacama Desert, Chile. The telescopes have been used to substantiate and characterize a brand new planet found by NASA, which led to the invention of one other close by planet.
ESO/P.Holárek
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ESO/P.Holárek
The telescopes of the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory within the Atacama Desert, Chile. The telescopes have been used to substantiate and characterize a brand new planet found by NASA, which led to the invention of one other close by planet.
ESO/P.Holárek
A global crew of scientists says it has found two new “super-Earth” sort planets about 100 light-years away, one among which can be appropriate for all times.
Not like any of the planets in our photo voltaic system, the practically 1,600 recognized super-Earths are bigger than Earth, however lighter than icy planets like Uranus and Neptune.
Researchers at Belgium’s College of Liège introduced Wednesday that they discovered one other one whereas utilizing Earth-based telescopes to substantiate the existence of a unique planet initially found by a NASA satellite tv for pc in the identical photo voltaic system.
NASA’s satellite tv for pc discovered planet LP 890-9b, which is about 30% bigger than Earth and orbits its solar in simply 2.7 days. ULiège researchers used their SPECULOOS (Seek for liveable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes in Chile and Spain to take a more in-depth take a look at the planet with high-precision cameras.
That is when the stargazers found one other planet, LP 890-9c (renamed SPECULOOS-2c by the ULiège researchers), which is 40% bigger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit its solar.
Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher on the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and one of many foremost co-authors of the paper, stated in a information launch that the planet might be appropriate to life regardless of being a mere 3.7 million miles from its solar. Earth, by comparability, is situated over 93 million miles away from our solar.
“Though this planet orbits very near its star, at a distance about 10 occasions shorter than that of Mercury round our Solar, the quantity of stellar irradiation it receives remains to be low, and will enable the presence of liquid water on the planet’s floor, offered it has a ample ambiance,” Pozuelos stated. “It is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 occasions smaller than the Solar and has a floor temperature half that of our star.”
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite tv for pc (TESS) searches for exoplanets orbiting close by stars by monitoring gentle ranges of hundreds of stars. New planets are found when a planet passes in entrance of a kind of stars, inflicting the sunshine being monitored to dim.
ULiège scientists then comply with up NASA’s findings with ground-based telescopes to substantiate and characterize the planets.
