According to an article in the journal Nature, GJ 1132b – the name of a rocky planet quite similar in size to Earth – revolves around a star 39 light years away from us. It is about 16% larger than our Earth.
David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, and his colleagues discovered GJ 1132b.
Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in the United States, says that since GJ 1132b is only 39 light years from Earth, researchers can use a telescope to study its atmosphere.
The planet revolves around a narrow red dwarf star 39 light years from Earth, revolves after 1.5 days, and absorbs a lot of stellar radiation during the process. The team found signs of a second atmosphere produced by the exoplanet itself.
“The discovery is extremely interesting because we believe that the atmosphere we see is reproduced, which means that it could be the second atmosphere”, co-author of the study Raissa Estrela, scientist specializing in foreign medicine . Planets at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said. “Initially, we thought that the radiant planets could be quite boring because they had lost their atmosphere. But we looked at earlier observations of GJ 1132b via the Hubble Telescope and were amazed. Know that the atmosphere exists there.
The loss of atmosphere could create a planet as large as Earth but has a very different history from ours. Researchers believe that after GJ 1132 lost its atmosphere rich in hydrogen and helium, it became a barren world. But Hubble’s observations show that the GJ 1132b is now covered with a mixture of hydrogen gas, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and aerosol-rich mist like haze on Earth.
To find out what happened to the system, the team focused on the relationship between GJ 1132 and the host star. One side of the exoplanet always faces the host star, much like the Moon orbits the Earth. But in this case, the gravitational pull of the star with GJ 1132 b is so strong that it heats the planet a lot. The result could be frequent volcanic activity.
Then the atmosphere could be formed from gas escaping from molten rock on the planet. In particular, the team described the GJ 1132b as a world covered with a thin shell with many eggshell-shaped cracks. The cracks originate from the host star’s gravity, allowing gas to escape, creating a second atmosphere. The researchers hope that NASA’s powerful space telescope James Webb, scheduled to launch this fall, will help them observe the surface of the GJ 1132b with infrared light. The results of the research will be published in the Astronomical Journal.
