By examining images from a large telescope in Spain, a team of mostly European astronomers has discovered an extremely rare type of exoplanet 31 light years from Earth.
A team led by Diana Kosakowski, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, writes in: A peer-reviewed study, the latest version appeared online on February 2. This study will be published in a journal Astronomy and astrophysics.
Wolf 1069b could be an Earth cousin. But if that’s the case, this is the odd third cousin you’ll avoid at family reunions. Yes, it seems like the right size, temperature, and installation to make a good home for life as we know it. But Wolf 1069 b seems to be rotating at just the right speed to keep the same side facing its star at all times. That is, there is constant light or constant darkness depending on which half of the planet you live in. It’s also surprising that Wolf 1069 b may be alone in its star system. There are no neighboring planets. There wasn’t even a moon to accompany them.
By its mixture of familiarity and sheer alienation, Wolf 1069 is unique among exoplanets. Imagine the Earth, but omit the day-night cycle, survey the Moon, and survey all the nearby planets in the night sky.
Super exoplanets can help us redefine what we consider habitable planets. “Wolf 1069 b is an important discovery that will allow further exploration into the habitability of Earth-mass planets,” wrote Kosakowski’s team.
color of space
Kosakowski and colleagues discovered Wolf 1069b in data collected by the Karmenes instrument on the 11.5-foot telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain. Carmenes — which premiered in 2016 — detects changes in the color of very distant objects in space.
This shift, the result of an accordion-like change in the wavelength of light reflected from an object, can indicate the object’s motion relative to the observer. An object that changes color in a certain way, over a period of time, could be a planet.
By analyzing images taken by Karmenis between 2017 and 2020, Kosakowski’s team — including scientists in Cyprus, Germany, Spain and the United States — made a strange discovery. The spectral pattern shows a single planet orbiting the dwarf star Wolf 1069.
This planet appears to be roughly the same size as Earth and has a similar composition. That is, rocky rather than gaseous. Just as importantly, Wolfe 1069b orbits its low-mass star at a distance of about 650,000 miles, placing it in the star’s “habitable zone.” Close enough to sustain warm temperatures – and thus potential for life.
Wolf 1069 as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky survey.
Wikimedia Commons
Scientists have identified more than 5,000 exoplanets. Not many of them are the size of Earth And in the habitable zone of their star. In fact, only 20 exoplanets meet these criteria. Among them, Wolf 1069b is the sixth closest to Earth.
All things being equal, Wolf 1069 b should be one of the top priorities as scientists scour the universe for signs of alien life and create a list of habitable planets our descendants might colonize. But Wolf 1069 b has some strange features. The planet appears to rotate on its axis at the same speed that the planet itself rotates around its star. In other words, the same half of the planet always faces the sun. There is eternal night on the far side and eternal day on the near side.
This does not mean that Wolf 1069 b cannot support life. He. He Do I mean, they’re probably uninhabitable – and only by species that can adapt to light or dark all the time.
Giant effect
There is also the fact that there is no clear evidence of any other planet orbiting the star Wolf 1069. This is very rare. So rare that Kossakowski’s team speculated that there might be at least one other planet in the system—but long ago, they collided with Wolf 1069 b. “Wolf 1069 b may have had a violent formation history,” the scientists wrote.
This type of planetary collision – called a “giant collision” – was actually very common in the early millennia of star systems’ formation. A potential giant collision between Earth and an old neighbor 4.5 billion years ago may have reshaped our young planet.
The colossal collision was extremely destructive. But it can also be very productive after the dust has settled, millions of years after the impact.
This is especially true for land. “I think the impact created a huge diversity of environments on Earth, including the continents themselves, which ultimately allowed complex microorganisms to thrive,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Australia, who was not involved in the research. Daily Beast.
Collisions of this size could also send large amounts of debris into the orbits of larger planets. debris which, over time, could clump together and form the moon. Obviously, that’s how our moon was formed.
Another odd thing about Wolf 1069 b is that the planet appears to have benefited from all the geological mix-ups from the giant-looking collisions, but NO We have a moon that we can see with our telescopes. The moon may exist, but we haven’t found it yet. Or maybe a moon that never formed and, after sucking in all its neighboring planets, the exoplanet is completely alone in a corner of the galaxy.
The absence of the moon has some extraordinary effects. Our moon pulls on our oceans with its gravity, thus creating our tides. Billions of years ago, the tides repeatedly cut aquatic organisms short to dry land, forcing them to adapt. “It appears that the displacement of surface water from the tides … helped life on Earth emerge from the oceans,” Thomas Fuches, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a member of Kosakowski’s team, told The Daily Beast.
To be clear, evolution is theoretically possible without ups and downs. “A supermoon does not have to exist for a planet to have life,” Rajdeep Dasgupta, a planetary scientist at Rice University who was not involved in the study, told The Daily Beast.
These ups and downs, says Dasgupta, “will definitely influence the further evolution of the planet.” This is an astrobiological bonus. So if there really is life on Wolf 1069 b, it’s likely that it followed a very different evolutionary path than life on Earth.
Future scan
Tim Kosakowski may be wrong, of course. Everything we know right now about Wolf 1069 b, we’ve got from a few color images but they’re not very clear. As our telescopes improve, so will our data. We may discover that we are wrong about a planet that is semi-dark but appears to be habitable.
Fauchez is keen to confirm whether Wolf 1069 b is really ab in its own way. “Future surveys of Wolf 1069 b may search for inner planets in the system,” he said, noting that the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b appears to be alone until follow-up surveys find nearby planets.
On the other hand, these future surveys can find themselves again Strange planetary features. Kosakowski and his colleagues emphasize that a planet without a moon and no tides “could lead to unique atmospheric circulation pathways” that we can only guess at present.
On Earth, for example, Rain tends to be more When the moon is high in the sky, its gravity slightly bends our atmosphere. In Wolf 1069 b, there may be no moon influencing weather patterns.
Today, Wolf 1069 b looks very odd but perfectly suited to live for us or some exotic species. Further study could make it appear more livable, or less. Maybe it’s less like an odd third cousin on Earth and more like a sister. Or maybe you don’t belong in the family at all.
Either way, we should know sooner. Fuchese said he and his colleagues have laid out plans to investigate exoplanets further.
