The discovery of a giant Earth near the habitable zone of its star – space and astronomy

The discovery of a giant Earth near the habitable zone of its star – space and astronomy

a excellentEarth, four times the size of our planet, was discovered near the boundary of its star’s habitable zone, called Ross 508: its presence is revealed by the almost imperceptible movements that the star makes due to the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. around. This is the first exoplanet discovered as part of a new investigation that began in 2019 using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOG). search Online On the arXiv platform, which welcomes articles awaiting review by the scientific community, and being published in the Journal of the Japan Astronomical Society.

Ross 508, located only 36.5 light-years away, is a red dwarf, much smaller and fainter than our Sun. The newly discovered planet, Ross 508b (which is very likely to be of the terrestrial or rocky type), rotates every 10.75 days: so it may appear that the planet is very close to its star, but the radiation it hits at that distance is only 1.4 times that of it Earth, a feature that makes it very close to the inner limit of the habitable zone. Anyway, the excellentEarth It hosts lifeforms, at least as we know them.

Ross 508 is one of the smallest and fainter stars with a planet orbiting around it thanks to the radial velocity method, also known as the Doppler method: when the star moves a little towards us, the star’s light reaches Earth It is more on the blue, while when it moves away, the light turns towards red. This indicates that future investigations using this observing technology have the potential to reveal a huge treasure trove of exoplanets orbiting faint stars.

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