Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, although it is still larger than Earth. It is a planet whose radius is twice that of Earth and its mass is 7.5 times.
Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, although it is still larger than Earth. It is a planet whose radius is twice that of Earth and its mass is 7.5 times. It revolves at a tremendous speed, the whole cycle lasts days, the star called Gliese 876 which is 15 light years away from us. Two Jupiter-like planets are already known in this system. This is the first time that a rocky (or terrestrial) planet has been discovered around another star not much different from the Sun.
Nearly 150 planets discovered so far around other suns were larger than Uranus - a gas giant whose mass is 15 times greater than that of Earth.
"We're continuing to push our ability toward the limits of our ability to discover, and we're getting closer to finding Earths," said team member Dativan Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The discovered star is a super-Earth, orbiting the star Glace 876 which is 15 light years away from us in the direction of the Aquarius group. Two Jupiter-like planets are already known in this system. The new planet orbits the aforementioned star in a period of days and is so close to the surface of the star that the temperatures on it range from 200 to 400 degrees Celsius, too hot to support life (as in Venus, although Venus is quite far from the Sun, and could support Haim had it not been for the greenhouse phenomenon that raised the temperature on his face to about 500 degrees).
The ability to detect small perturbations that a planet causes to its sun gives astronomers confidence that they will be able to locate even smaller rocky planets in more habitable orbits.
"The question of the existence of planets outside the solar system is an ancient philosophical question," says Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus debated whether there were Earth-like stars. Now, for the first time, , we have evidence for the existence of rocky planets around a normal star."
For the news in Universe Today
