An international team of scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of two exoplanets, one of which could possibly host life, 100 light-years from Earth.
The exoplanets orbit the red dwarf star LP 890-9, the second-coldest star known to host a planetary system. Both exoplanets are larger than Earth, but they have orbits far shorter than a year.
The exoplanet LP 890-9b was detected by a NASA satellite. It is 30% larger than Earth and has an orbit of only 2.7 days. When researchers from the University of Liege in Belgium looked to confirm the exoplanet’s orbit, they found the second exoplanet.
That exoplanet, LP 890-9c, is 40% larger than Earth and has an orbit of 8.5 days. It falls within the inner edge of the habitable zone.
Habitable zones refer to areas where celestial bodies with geology and atmospheric conditions similar to Earth are capable of keeping water liquid for billions of years.
“Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation it receives is still low, and could allow the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface, provided it has a sufficient atmosphere. This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star,” Francisco J. Pozuelos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain, said in an article on the University of Liege’s website.
The scientists will now aim to study the exoplanet’s atmosphere to assess how favorable it could be to living organisms.
“It is important to detect as many temperate terrestrial worlds as possible to study the diversity of exoplanet climates, and eventually to be in a position to measure how frequently biology has emerged in the cosmos,” said University of Birmingham researcher Amaury Triaud.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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