Last month we received wonderful news from NASA. Yeah, about the discovery of a new Earth. And we wrote an article based on that discovery. Many of you have appreciated our late legendary Space Telescope, Kepler for uncovering that untold marvellous truth.
Many of you disappointed only because of the distance at which that exoplanet is – 300 light-years. Oh..Oh. Not possible for 12 generations even if we could travel at the speed of light. Many of your responses to that article were so funny and you guys were curious to know more about the new Earth and Alien life. Some of them are given below.
It was for the first time we were finding an Earth-like planet orbiting around a red dwarf. So we ended the article with a hope that we could hear similar discovery news very soon due to the abundance of red dwarf around us. And now, only a few weeks after that, we got that most awaited news. Yeah, Scientists have discovered another Earth which is also orbiting a red dwarf. It’s True; The existence of this planet has been confirmed by an international team of scientists including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE).
The great suspense in this news is the star’s name. The Star, whose name is so popular. Our neighbour Star, a very close neighbour, Yeah, Proxima Centauri. Only 4.244 Light-years from us – Just a stone’s throw away, Cosmically speaking. In this scientifically advancing, high tech modern society, we can hope for a journey to meet our new neighbours. A ray of hope and an answer to many curious minds, yeah, we got a neighbour, A New Earth. Frankly speaking, I can’t wait to see them, But all of us have to. An answer to the most asked curious question of many generations. In my opinion, we should appreciate this patience level of humanity.
Now, let’s see how peculiar is this new Earth. This new Earth-like Exoplanet has a mass of 1.17 earth masses and is located in the habitable zone of its star. Scientists named this new Earth as Proxima b. In the case of Kepler-1649c, a 5-year-old boy would be 94 years old on that planet. But the same boy would be 163 years old in Proxima b. Yeah, Proxima b complete its orbit around Proxima Centauri in 11.2 days.
Proxima b is 20 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, but it receives a similar amount of energy from the star and thereby it can hold liquid water on its surface. But red dwarf always bombards it the planet with a huge amount of X-Rays. This may affect the existence of life on that planet. So it is necessary for the planet to have an atmosphere that prevents these x rays. In order to verify the existence of life, we have to find the chemical elements that promote the development of life on that planet. Few more detailed studies may give us a complete nature of that planet and as per the comments made by the researchers, we can say that they will give an answer to those questions very soon in the near future. Given below are such a comment from them.
“We’re going to tackle all these questions, especially with the help of future instruments like the RISTRETTO spectrometer, which we’re going to build specially to detect the light emitted by Proxima b, and HIRES, which will be installed on the future ELT 39 m giant telescope that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is building in Chile.”
High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) is the real hero behind this observation. Proxima b was first discovered by HARPS four years ago by the help of old spectrograph. But scientists were not sure about the output. They went for further observation using the most accurate currently operating ESPRESSO, the Swiss-manufactured spectrograph which is installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
We can find many links connecting discoveries of both Kepler-1649c and Proxima b. At the end of that article, we found that there is a chance for another planet in that stellar system. Likewise here also we got a hint that tells us about the possibility of another planet. Scientists have received a second anonymous signal which assumed to be planetary in origin. It predicts the existence of a planet having mass less than one-third of the mass of the Earth. If this is true, then it will be the smallest planet ever measured using the radial velocity method.
A discovery which is full of suspense and wonders. Get ready to say first hi to our unknown neighbour. We can expect many such awesome observations and discoveries very soon. We are now very close to the solution for that curious question of many generations “Are we alone?!”
References:
- Université de Genève.
- Revisiting Proxima with ESPRESSO. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12114v1
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.12114v1.pdf
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