Scientists Rediscover 'Lost Planet' NGTS-11b, It Could Give Us More Answers About Other Habitable Planets

The question ‘are humans alone in the universe’ still does not seem to have a definite answer, and the recent rediscovery of a ‘lost’ planet has probably made things more complicated.?

The planet was rediscovered within the habitable 'Goldilocks zone' in a distant solar system.

NASA

The planet is named NGTS-11b and orbits a star 620 light years away. It is located five times closer to its sun than Earth is to our own.

The planet is the size of and has the same mass as Saturn. It has an orbit of thirty-five days. It is one of the many ‘lost’ worlds that University of Warwick astronomers are ‘pioneering a new method to track down and characterise’ in the hope of finding cooler planets like those in our solar system, and even potentially habitable planets, reports?Astrobiology Web.?

The planet was first found in 2018 by the Warwick-led team that used data from NASA's TESS telescope. The telescope uses the transit method to spot planets, scanning for the telltale dip in light from the star that indicates that an object has passed between the telescope and the star.?

TESS only scans most section of the sky for 27 days.?

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Representational Image/ Pixabay

This means that longer period planets only transit once in the TESS data. That means without a second observation the planet is lost.?

‘The University of Warwick led team followed up one of these 'lost' planets using the telescopes at the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) in Chile and observed the star for seventy-nine nights, eventually catching the planet transiting for a second time nearly a year after the first detected transit’, Astrobiology Web states.

Dr Samuel Gill from the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick reportedly said, "By chasing that second transit down we've found a longer period planet. It's the first of hopefully many such finds pushing to longer periods. These discoveries are rare but important, since they allow us to find longer period planets than other astronomers are finding. Longer period planets are cooler, more like the planets in our own Solar System.”

Representational Image/Unsplash

He also said, "NGTS-11b has a temperature of only 160°C - cooler than Mercury and Venus. Although this is still too hot to support life as we know it, it is closer to the Goldilocks zone than many previously discovered planets which typically have temperatures above 1000°C."

The Goldilocks zone is a range of orbits that would allow a planet or moon to support liquid water: too close to its star and it will be too hot, but too far away and it will be too cold.

"This planet is out at a thirty-five days orbit, which is a much longer period than we usually find them. It is exciting to see the Goldilocks zone within our sights,” Co-author Dr Daniel Bayliss from the University of Warwick said.?