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RIO – The North American Space Agency (Pot) announced on Wednesday the discovery of an exoplanet in a habitable zone. The body was named Kepler-1649c, referring to the space telescope that captured its image, the Kepler. Scientists have described the planet as the closest to Earth, and closest to us, among all the exoplanets located by the telescope.
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Kepler-1649c, which is 300 light years from our planet, has a distance from its star that allows any rocky planet to contain liquid water. Scientists discovered this by reviewing the file created by the Kepler telescope, removed by the agency in 2018. The planet went unnoticed by previous research, done by computer algorithms. At a second glance, however, astronomers recognized his signal.
According to NASA, the exoplanet is only 1.06 larger than Earth, and receives about 75% of the light our planet receives from its star from its star. The big difference is that Kepler-1649c orbits a red dwarf, a category of stars prone to frequent explosions that can hinder the survival of more complex organisms.
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For NASA, the discovery is “exciting,” as Andrew Vanderburg, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of the article published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in Kepler-1649c, said.
The reason is that, of all the exoplanets identified by NASA, this is, at the same time, the one with a size and temperature more similar to that of Earth. There are others with more approximate temperatures, such as TRAPPIST-1f and Teegarden c. And others with more similar sizes, such as TRAPPIST-1d and TOI 700d. But neither is as close to Earth in both respects as Kepler-1649c.
Scientists now want to discover other details about the planet, such as the configuration of its atmosphere, which can also affect its temperature. Body size calculations are still preliminary and should be reviewed in the coming weeks.
