Scientists discover ‘closest Earth-sized exoplanet to date’, close enough to

Now, Berta-Thompson describes how they found the planet.

One day on Venus lasts as long as 243 Earth days.

“Our expectation going in is that the atmosphere might look something like Venus’, with lots of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas”. With an average surface temperature of 440 F, the planet is inhospitable.

Despite how much weaker its star is, the planet is roasting away like an egg on pavement during a summer afternoon.

Today a team of astronomers led by Zach Berta-Thompson, an exoplanet researcher at MIT, has announced the discovery of the closest Earth-sized rocky exoplanet by far.

Commenting on one of the planets, Brad Tucker, an astronomer from Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia who was not involved in the research, said it “probably gives us the best chance for life outside our solar system right now”.

Already, despite its obvious intense heat ruling out the possibility of liquid water on its surface, it is exciting scientists because its proximity to Earth will allow astronomers to study it in unprecedented detail with potential for at least bacteria to live on its surface. It is also possible for the planet to have siblings. The planet, GJ 1132b, is located 39 light-years, or 230 trillion miles away, from Earth.

Berta-Thompson is excited to find out what color the exoplanet’s atmosphere, as well as its chemical composition and wind patterns – all observations Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which launches in 2018, will likely be able to make.

Astronomers from MA Institute of Technology said that they have found a new planet in space bearing a few familiarity.

“The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it’s like burnt-cookie hot”.

Drop This Fact: One study suggested that there are 160 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way.

This animation shows the distances of known transiting exoplanet systems.

Jonathan Fortney, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says the new planet is a good deal cooler than other nearby rocky planets that have been discovered so far. Other planets such as CoRoT-7b and Kepler-10b are very hot at a scorching temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Since the red dwarf star is small, the relative size of the planet to the star is larger than it would be for a Sun-like star. As it is so close, the planet experiences strong tides from it’s star.

In this artist’s conception GJ 1132b, a rocky exoplanet very similar to Earth in size and mass, circles a red dwarf star.

They found that GJ 1132b is 16 percent larger than Earth, with a diameter of about 9,200 miles. However, despite its differences from Earth, researchers believe the planet could be an important step to understanding what types of rocky worlds are capable of sustaining living organisms.

Scientists recently found a planet that is too hot to live in, but apparently cool enough to feature a thick atmosphere, similar to the planet Venus.

He added in a statement: “We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere, too, and if it does, we can’t wait to get a whiff”.

Called an “exoplanet”, because it orbits a star other than the sun, GJ1132b is roughly Earth-sized and the closest exoplanet ever discovered.