Finding a habitable exoplanet is not as easy as you think. The first step is to orbit at a temperate distance from the host star. Size and structure also play a role - the level of flame activity in a star. And all this does not mean much. If the system is too far away, we cannot make detailed observations to determine if it is habitable.
The newly discovered system can tick a good number of those boxes. And it is very close - only 10.7 light-years away from the solar system. This means it may soon become one of the most studied systems in our local neighborhood.
"These planets provide excellent opportunities for further detailed studies, including the discovery of life outside our solar system," said Sandra Jeffers, an astrophysicist at the University of Gà°Ÿ్à°Ÿిttingen in Germany.
Tara is known as the Lockale 9352, or GJ887. In its orbit, scientists have discovered two exoplanets that are terrestrial - rock like Earth and Mars. In the interim, the hypothesis of a third terrestrial exoplanet also occurs at greater distances. This is very similar to limiting liquid water to the surface.
This reference to the third planet is considered involuntary at this stage, but the discovery of two close-orbit-planets (and the probability of a third planet) is sufficient to closely examine the GJ887 system.
This star is a red dwarf - a kind of long-lived, relatively cold, small star that is about half the mass of the sun - and is the most common star in the Milky Way.
We found several exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs; And, because these stars are not as hot as the sun, the Earth is much closer to the habitable temperate zone than the Earth.
However, the problem with red dwarfs is that they often cause catastrophes, extreme stellar radiation and inflammation to separate their atmosphere and make most of these nearby planets uninhabitable.
This is where the GJ887 stands. For the red dwarf, it's very quiet - it has very little starpot functionality and its brightness is more or less the same. This is of great interest to astronomers with the Red Dots Survey - a project to find terrestrial worlds around nearby red dwarf stars.
As part of the survey, the La Silla 3.6 m telescope in Chile was studied for three months using the European Southern Observatory's high-precision radial speed planet finder.
This delicate device looks at the stars, looking for very slight changes in their light as they move a tiny step, passing through the gravitational effects of the planets orbiting them. In GJ 887, these movements detected two distinct periodic signals.
The motion of a star can be used to calculate the mass of the objects that make up the star. Researchers thus found two exoplanets, GJ887B and GJ887C, which were confirmed by comparing the 200-day archival data obtained from 2002 to 2004.
The GJ887B has a minimum mass of 4.2 times the mass of the Earth, and it orbits the star once every 9.3 days. The GJ 887c has a mass of 7.6 times the mass of the Earth, and orbits the star once every 21.8 days.
Those individuals placed the exoplanets in the ‘super-Earth’ category, but without further study, it is impossible to tell whether they were terrestrial or aerosol. According to their estimates for the star, the two planets are not habitable, but they are very close to the inner edge of the habitable zone.
The third sign, however - if it refers to an exoplanet - forms an 8.3 Earth-mass super-Earth in the center of the star's habitable zone, with an orbital period of 50.7 days. There is only one problem - the signal is only detected once in the HARPS data.
This indicates that there is no Exoplanet. Researchers wrote in their paper, "We expect the third signal to be suspicious and stellar activity in ~ 50 days, but we cannot rule out that possibility with the current data."
This means that the researchers are going back once again to see if the signal can be picked up again, and planetary scientists would like to keep an eye on the GJ887B and GJ887C anyway.
Due to the lack of stellar activity, the two exoplanets may maintain their atmosphere, and since the light from the star is so constant, the light from the star bounces off them.
Our current equipment is not yet capable of measuring, but it is one of the works of the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch next year, which is designed for display. This is enough to directly soften the image of the nearby Exoplanet, which could revolutionize the field of planetary science.
"These kinds of observations tell us about the atmospheric makeup of these planets," said Melvin Davis, an astronomer at the Lund Observatory in Sweden, who is not involved in the research.
"If further observations confirm that there is a third planet in the habitable zone, GJ887 could become one of the most studied planets in the solar environment."
The research is published in Science.
0 Comments