This exoplanet is known to be 1.4 times the size of Earth and is about 40 light years from us.
We know that finding a new planet that looks like Earth and can support life is a scientist’s dream. However, it is not easy.
Even so, experts are still diligently looking for and discovering a new best candidate – signs of life outside our solar system. It’s called LHS 1140b – a little bigger than Earth and about 40 light years away.
Principal investigator Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said, “This is the most interesting exoplanet I have seen in the last decade. We can all have hope. Something to accomplish the greatest task of science – finding evidence of extraterrestrial life.
LHS 1140b is known as Super Earth – a planet with a mass greater than Earth, 1.4 times greater than Earth, and possibly composed of a dense iron core.
However, what makes LHS 1140b so attractive for further analysis is not its size or mass – it orbits a host star’s habitable zone, in the Cetus constellation, and is shaded. here.
LHS 1140b is actually 10 times closer to its host star than the distance between Earth and the Sun – but because LHS 1140 is cooler, it doesn’t “crack” at close range. This planet also receives only an amount of light because the Sun only shines on Earth.
“LHS 1140 spins slower and emits less energy radiation than similar low-mass stars,” said Nicola Astudillo-defru, astronomer at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.
This is important because the amount of heat and light coming from the star is not so hot that liquid cannot exist on the surface of the planet – essential for life.
The team hopes the planet can survive one atmosphere, trapping less water vapor produced by magmatic oceans that might have boiled on the surface in its ancient past.
To help test this hypothesis, the team plans to “send” more of the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Telescope to study.
Although it is not the first planet, scientists have discovered and declared that they can exist with life. Because just this month, NASA experts announced the discovery of an atmosphere around another super-Earth called Gliese 1132b.
However, let’s just believe and hope in the discoveries of the scientific community because maybe in the near future we will be able to “wrap a melon” on the way to the journey to Earth 2.
The results are reported in the journal Nature.
