New Super Earth Exoplanet Is 70% Larger, 59 Times Hotter Than Our Earth
They¡¯ve named it TOI-1685b and it's located roughly 122 light-years away.
There is no other place like our Earth, for humans to survive and thrive, neither Mars nor Moon and definitely not Venus.
However, this doesn¡¯t stop scientists from looking at other worlds in our universe, finding a habitable planet for us in case things went south here.
Representational Image: NASA
And now a team of international researchers led by Paz Bluhm of the Heidelberg University in Germany, have discovered an exoplanet not very different from our home, which they deem as a ¡®super Earth¡¯. They¡¯ve named it TOI-1685b and it's located roughly 122 light-years away.
Astronomers explain in their study, "We present the discovery of the ultra-short-period planet TOI-1685b, which orbits its host star with a period of 0.669 d. To con?rm the planetary nature of the TESS transiting candidate we obtained high-resolution spectra using the CARMENES spectrograph.¡±
The reason this Earth-lookalike gets the ¡®super¡¯ status is because it is 70 percent more massive than our home planet. But surprisingly a day on the plane lasts only 16 hours, compared to 24 on Earth.
But as always, not everything is perfect in this world as it is one of the hottest Earth-sized exoplanets discovered with a surface temperature of 1069 Kelvin or around 800 degrees Celsius. Earth¡¯s temperature is barely 14.9 degrees Celsius.
NASA¡¯s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is looking at around 200,000 of the biggest stars to look for planets that have a relationship similar to that of Earth and our Sun. TOI-1658b will be added to this list of discoveries. So far, it has identified over 2,500 candidate exoplanets, and 113 have been confirmed.
For any planet to be regarded as a habitable planet for humans, it should have a star, similar to Earth and the Sun. TOI-1658b also has a home star that¡¯s called an M dwarf or red dwarf star. This star is roughly half the size and mass of the Sun and has an effective temperature of 3,434K. Researchers predicted the star¡¯s age to be between 0.6 to 2 billion years.
Representational Image: NASA
Researchers also found evidence that there could be more planets orbiting this red dwarf, however, they reveal that more data is needed to come to a conclusion, ¡°Based on the currently available RV data, it is not possible to con?dently claim the detection of a second planet in the system. To reach a solid conclusion, more data will be needed.¡±
