Ovidio Universe: Astronomers have discovered a star and potentially habitable planet that are strikingly similar to the sun and Earth

January 28, 2021

Astronomers have discovered a star and potentially habitable planet that are strikingly similar to the sun and Earth

Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable exoplanet and its star that are strikingly similar to the Earth and the sun.
The planet is less than double the size of Earth. The star it orbits is about the size of the sun and emits visible light.
The system is about 3,000 light-years away from our solar system. Future space telescopes could someday study it in more detail.

Scientists have found a potentially habitable exoplanet and its star that are more similar to the Earth and our sun than any other known planet-star pair.

The planet — which is still considered a planet candidate until further confirmation — is the right distance from its star to allow for the presence of liquid surface water. That means it could potentially host life. The Earth-like world is about 1.9 times the size of our planet.

"It's the combination of this less-than-double the size of the Earth planet and its solar type host star that make it so special and familiar," Dr. René Heller, the lead author of the new study, said in a press release. Her team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research described the planet and star in a paper published last week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

For now, the planet candidate is known as KOI-456.04. If its existence is confirmed by other telescopes, the exoplanet would join a group of about 4,000 known planets outside our solar system.

What makes an exoplanet habitable

To be considered habitable, planets must orbit a stable star at a distance that maintains a temperature suitable for liquid water.

The Milky Way galaxy could hold up to 10 billion Earth-like planets, some estimates suggest, but only about 4,000 have been identified.

The vast majority of exoplanets don't meet the conditions required for life to exist. Most of the potentially habitable worlds researchers have found orbit red dwarf stars, which aren't stable enough. Red dwarf stars are smaller and fainter than the sun, and emit infrared radiation. They also sometimes send out high-energy flares that can fry the planets around them.

The new finding came after astronomers reexamined archived data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which NASA retired in October 2018. The telescope passed the exoplanet-hunting torch to to the TESS satellite telescope, which began its observations in August 2018.

Because KOI-456.04 is less than double the size of Earth, that could mean its atmospheric conditions are similar to ours. Plus, the star the planet candidate orbits is about 1.1 times the size of the sun, with a surface temperature of 5,200 degrees Celsius (only 300 degrees less than the sun). The star also emits visible light, like our sun does.

If KOI-456.04's atmosphere is like Earth's — meaning it has a mild greenhouse effect — then its average surface temperature would be about 5 degrees Celsius, compared to Earth's average of 15 degrees Celsius, according to the Max Planck Institute.

by Business Insider

An artist's impression of exoplanet K2-18b, its host star, and an accompanying planet in the system.

ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

No comments:

Post a Comment

Black Holes and Wormholes FAQ

1 - What is a wormhole?

Wormholes are tunnels in space-time that can theoretically allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. In many ways, wormholes resemble black hole.

2- How is wormhole created?

In principle, building a wormhole is pretty straightforward. According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, mass and energy warp the fabric of space-time. And a certain special configuration of matter and energy allows the formation of a tunnel, a shortcut between two otherwise distant portions of the universe

3- Is a wormhole possible?

A physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.

4- Can black holes be wormholes?

From the outside, wormholes can appear similar to black holes. But while an object that falls into a black hole is trapped there, something that falls into a wormhole could traverse through it to the other side. No evidence has been found that wormholes exist

Baryon Matter

Baryon matter is the foundation that 
constitutes every body and object in 
our Universe. 
To better understand how it is structured, 
it is necessary to refer to the classification 
scheme  of the Standard Model as it has 
been structured over the last century.  
The Standard Model predicts that matter 
is basically the product of two types of
particles,light ones,leptons, and heavy ones, 
baryons. 
Both terms derive from the Greek. 
While leptons are truly fundamental particles, 
i.e. not further divisible into other particles, 
baryons are aggregates of other elementary 
particles such as leptons, quarks that are 
endowed with fractional charge,
 i.e. a fraction of the charge of an electron.

Light Year

The light-year is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometres (9.46×10¹² km) or 5.88 trillion miles (5.88×10¹² mi).As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year (365.25 days).Because it includes the word "year", the term light-year may be misinterpreted as a unit of time.

The light-year is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist contexts and popular science publications.

1 light-year	= 9460730472580800 metres (exactly)
	≈ 9.461 petametres
	≈ 9.461 trillion kilometres (5.879 trillion miles)
	≈ 63241.077 astronomical units
	≈ 0.306601 parsecs

What is the antimatter

The antimatter is missing – not from CERN, but from the Universe! At least that is what we can deduce so far from careful examination of the evidence. For each basic particle of matter, there exists an antiparticle with the same mass, but the opposite electric charge. The negatively charged electron, for example, has a positively charged antiparticle called the positron. When a particle and its antiparticle come together, they both disappear, quite literally in a flash, as the annihilation process transforms their mass into energy.

The evidence spoke for itself

The ‘case file’ of antimatter was opened in 1928 by physicist Paul Dirac. He developed a theory that combined quantum mechanics and Einstein’s special relativity to provide a more complete description of electron interactions. The basic equation he derived turned out to have two solutions, one for the electron and one that seemed to describe something with positive charge (in fact, it was the positron). Then in 1932 the evidence was found to prove these ideas correct, when the positron was discovered occurring naturally in cosmic rays.

For the past 50 years and more, laboratories like CERN have routinely produced antiparticles, and in 1995 CERN became the first laboratory to create anti-atoms artificially. But no one has ever produced antimatter without also obtaining the corresponding matter particles. The scenario should have been the same during the birth of the Universe, when equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been produced in the Big Bang.

“Just one more thing…”

So if matter and antimatter annihilate, and we and everything else are made of matter, why do we still exist? This mystery arises because we find ourselves living in a Universe made exclusively of matter. Didn't matter and antimatter completely annihilate at the time of the Big Bang? Perhaps this antimatter still exists somewhere else? Otherwise where did it go and what happened to it in the first place?

Such questions have led to speculative theories, from a break in the rules to the existence of an entire anti-Universe somewhere else! The way to solve the baffling disappearance of antimatter, and to learn more about this substance in general, is by studying both particles and antiparticles to find and decipher the subtle clues.