Loading…
The soft planet next to a red dwarf is the smallest and faintest star still converting hydrogen to helium. PHOTO / DAILY
READ ALSO – Aliens on 29 Planets Peek at humans on Earth, pay attention to any planet
Scientists have claimed that it is indeed the thinnest exoplanet ever discovered orbiting a red dwarf star.
As the atmosphere is considered to be one of the major features of the planet that allows life to form and thrive, this discovery will have implications for human understanding of the habitability of planets orbiting red dwarf stars.
“Giant planets around red dwarfs have traditionally been considered difficult to form,” said Shubham Kanodia, a planetary astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, as reported by Daily Star Monday (10/24/2022).
“So far it has only been seen with small Doppler survey samples, which usually have found giant planets further away from these red dwarfs. So far we haven’t had a sufficiently large sample of planets in a definite way,” he added.
Red dwarf stars are the most common stars found. Of the entire stellar population of the Milky Way, 75% are red dwarfs. Stars like this are smaller, cooler, fainter than the sun. However, red dwarfs have a much longer life than the sun.
Hence, red dwarfs are ideal targets for the search for planets that could support life like Earth.
The problem is that red dwarfs are cold stars with a surface temperature below 4000 K. Stars like this don’t emit as much visible light as other types of stars. This means that red dwarf stars are very faint stars. It is not easy to find planets in red dwarfs in visual or visible wavelengths.
Not so if we observe it with instruments that work at infrared wavelengths.
.
In order for astronomers to observe red dwarf stars in the Universe, special instruments have been developed that work at infrared wavelengths.
To this end, astronomers developed a mounted infrared Doppler spectrograph (IRD) Subbar telescopeyou of Hawaii.
(wb)
