Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Scientists discovered that there is a planet that resembles Earth out there. The planet is said to orbit the star closest to the sun.
The planet is less than half the size of Earth. It was reported that the new planet might be too hot to be habitable, quoted from CNBC InternationalMonday (25/4/2022).
Astronomer Joao Faria stated that the planet found was not in the habitable zone of the star. According to scientists, there may be life around Earth’s closest galactic neighbor, Proxima Centauri.
“So it is impossible for water to exist in a liquid state and the conditions are right for life,” said Faria, who is also the lead author of the study.
The new planet is very close to the center of the Solar System. which is about a tenth of the distance between the Sun and Mercury.
To orbit its star, the planet takes five days to complete an orbit. Faria said the new planet had to be verified by other observations.
Faria and his team also revealed that they detected in a small variant of Proxima’s starlight a wobble caused by the planet’s gravity. The same technique was used to detect the first planet in Proxima in 2016 and the second in 2019.
However, the latest search uses light collected by a new spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope atop a mountain in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. This is a more sensitive instrument than those that have been used before.
(npb)
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