Venus’ twin? Earth-size planet is hot, may have atmosphere

Even though the mercury can hit 450 degrees at this planet, it’s cool enough to have a thick atmosphere like Venus.

Dr Berta-Thompson said: ‘This planet is going to be a favourite target of astronomers for years to come. The Harvard University-led array monitors M dwarfs (type of dwarf stars), which are seen all over the night sky.

While it’s unlikely that GJ 1132b has any life on its surface, studying its atmosphere will provide good practice – in case we find another rocky Earth-like planet in a much more habitable area of space.

“Our galaxy spans about 100,000 light-years”.

“It’s hotter even than Venus [our solar system’s hottest planet] because it’s very close in to its star”, he explains.

GJ1132b orbits its star once every 1.6 days, causing a slight dimming – around 0.3 per cent – in the light coming from the M-dwarf star. With a surface temperature of 440 degrees Fahrenheit, GJ 1132b is more of an intergalactic furnace than a vacation prospect.

GJ 1132b was discovered by the MEarth-South array, which is dedicated to the hunt for terrestrial worlds orbiting red dwarf stars.

“If you have a mass and radius for a planet, that’s great, but it’s just a nondescript sphere”, he said.

They believe the exoplanet is rocky, like Earth.

GJ 1132b was discovered with the help of the MEarth-South Observatory, a Harvard University array of eight 16-inch wide robotic telescopes stationed in the mountains of Chile.

‘The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it’s like burnt-cookie hot. “It’s too hot to be habitable – there’s no way there’s liquid water on the surface”, said Dr. Zachory Berta-Thompson, an astronomer from MIT’s Kavli Institute. Other Earth-sized planets are more than three times as distant as this one and therefore much harder to get to know.

It is still an interesting planet to study.

If and when we train JWST on the rocky, Earth-like world that sits in its star’s Goldilocks zone, we’ll want to probe its atmosphere for things like oxygen and methane – so-called “biosignatures” that could indicate the presence of life. Planet GJ 1132b, however, is cool enough to have a rich atmosphere.

Could the perpetual night-side of the planet be cool enough for life? “So we think this planet probably still has something of a substantial atmosphere, in its current state”.

Berta-Thompson said the initial investigations of the newly found planet are just the beginning of what he hopes will be a lot more studies, especially once the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is launched in October 2018.

“We think it’s the first opportunity we have to point our telescopes at a rocky exoplanet and get that kind of detail, to be able to measure the colour of its sunset, or the speed of its winds, and really learn how rocky planets work out there in the Universe”, he said.

A team of astronomers identified an exoplanet that would certainly be inhospitable, but has key qualities that make it ideal for observation.

“Of the billions of star systems in the Milky Way galaxy, about 500 are closer than GJ1132”. That, in large part, makes it in his words “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system.” He was not involved with the study.Its unknown, for now, whether this star system harbors other planets.

Astronomers spotted the planet as it moved across the face of a red dwarf star only a fifth the size of the Sunday.

Unlike the planets in the recent deluges of Kepler data-whose potential for follow-up are vague and years off in the future- GJ 1132b is uniquely suited for immediate investigation. Maybe there will turn out to be an entire family of rocky planets sitting out there, a cosmic hop-skip away, just waiting to have their atmospheres probed by our telescopes.