Two Rocky Super-Earths Discovered Around A Nearby Star, And One Could Be Habitable

There is a red dwarf star 105 light-years away.

Scientists have found and confirmed two rocky exoplanets, one at a distance to the star known as the habitable zone and the other at a much closer distance.

The discovery is exciting and suggests that more such worlds could be found in the solar neighborhood.

Even if the exoplanet isn't a good place to live, it's still rare.

It's an important data point for the population of these exoplanets.

The TESS telescope was used to find the two exoplanets.

As it stared at a small red dwarf star namedLP 890-9, it picked up the faint, regular dips in starlight characteristic of an exoplanet circling between us and the star.

It's possible to tell us a lot about an exoplanet. For one, there is the fact that it exists. The period is called the orbital period. The diameter of the exoplanet can be deduced from how dim the starlight is.

More observations are required to confirm the detection and get more data on the exoplanets.

"This follow-up is important in the case of relatively cold stars, such as TOI-4306, which emit most of their light in the near-infrared and for which TESS has," says astronomer Laetitia Delez of the University of Lige in Belgium.

She and her team used the telescopes of the SPECULOOS to look at the stars. The data obtained in these observations proved the existence of the exoplanet.

The team looked for exoplanets that might have been missed by TESS, and found a second world, slightly more distant from the star. The exoplanet has a period of 8.4 days.

The team was able to study the two exoplanets in detail thanks to other data.

The upper mass limit for both exoplanets was given by the radialvelocity data.

It's up to 13 times its mass and 1.32 times the diameter.

It's up to 25 times its mass and 1.37 times the diameter.

The density of rocky worlds, like Earth, Mars, and Venus, are not as dense as icy worlds.

The planets can be classified as super-Earths because they are larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune.

Where they are around the star is where it gets interesting.

Scientists look for this in assessing the potential habitability of an alien world. Life as we know it will be too hot or cold for an exoplanet too close to its star.

There is a zone in the vicinity of every star in which liquid water can be found.

The star that is close to Earth is cooler and dimmer than the sun.

The exoplanet is located within its star's conservative habitable zone and receives the same stellar radiation as Earth.

It's the second most promising potentially habitable world discovered so far.

We should not get carried away. Robert Wells is an astronomer at the University of Bern in Germany.

"Our neighbor planet Venus, which is, so to speak, a carbon dioxide rich, near 500-degrees-Celsius pressure cooker, is also near this so-called habitable zone around the Sun."

We don't know what's going on out there, but it's close to the point at which a young planet might be caught in a runaway greenhouse effect.

A second team of scientists, including some of the authors on the paper, has already submitted a preprint, but we likely won't know until we get observations of the exoplanet's atmosphere.

This is proving to be a problem for the James Webb Space Telescope. We might have to wait a bit for observations because the telescope is in high demand.

Regardless of the outcome, we have something to learn from a target likeLP 890-9c.

Amaury Triaud is an astronomer at the University of Birmingham in the UK and he says that it's important to detect as many temperateterrestrial worlds as possible to study the diversity of exoplanet climates.

The research was published in astronomy and astrophysics.