Scientists detect super Earth ‘one in a million’

Towards the center of our galaxy, in a distant star system, there is a planet with characteristics that remind us of our home.

Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) of New Zealand discovered a particularly rare super Earth. “The new planet is one of the few extrasolar planets that have been detected with sizes and orbits close to Earth,” UC said in a statement Monday.

“Extrasolar planet” is another term for exoplanet, which describes a planet located outside our solar system. We only have artist impressions of what these planets might look likeBut they continue to fuel our curiosity as we search for distant worlds that are familiar to us.

The year of the newly discovered exoplanet lasts about 617 days and travels around a star much less massive than the sun. It is located near the central bulge of stars in the Milky Way. For the scale, Earth is about 25,000 light years away from the galactic center.

The researchers published their findings in The Astronomical Journal this month.

The discovery of super Earth was a fortuitous event that UC described as “one in a million.”

Astronomers used a gravitational microlensing technique to see the planet “The combined gravity of the planet and its host star caused the light from a more distant background star to be magnified in a particular way. We use telescopes around the world to measure the effect of light bending”, UC astronomer Antonio Herrera Martin said. .

There is a lot of hope wrapped up in a term like “super-Earth”, but there is no guarantee that a planet in this category will resemble ours. NASA describes the super-Earths as “up to 10 times more massive than Earth”, but says that their composition can vary from water worlds to icy planets or others made primarily of gas.

NASA has amassed some intriguing super-Earth discoveries in recent years, including the Kepler 62f potentially habitable.