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The discovery could have gone unnoticed. The planet was actually recorded by the Kepler telescope in 2013, but was not detected by algorithms that tracked the material for interesting discoveries.
“If we hadn’t done the job manually, we wouldn’t have figured it out,” says Andrew Vanderburg of the University of Texas.
He is one of the authors of a study now published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
He describes the planet as “the most Earth-like planet ever found.”
The planet has been named Kepler-1649c and is 300 light years away, writes NASA.
Located in “habitable zone”
What makes it more exciting is that the size is 1.06 times our own planet, and that the light it receives from its star is equivalent to 75 percent of the amount of light we get from the sun.
In addition, it is located in what is called the habitable zone, a distance from the star that allows water to exist in liquid form.
However, you don’t know what the atmosphere is like and it has a lot to say about the temperature and conditions in the soil.
Another problem could be radiation from the star that surrounds the planet, the red dwarf Kepler-1649.
Red dwarfs are among the most common stars we know of, and they are relatively small and dim. However, they often have eruptions that can hit the planets around them.
The planet spends just 19.5 days in an orbit around the star. The neighboring planet Kepler-1649b is even closer and is described as a planet similar to Venus.
– fascinating
“Red dwarfs are among the most common stars in the galaxy, which means that planets like this may be much more common than we have previously thought,” writes NASA.
– Of all the misspelled planets we’ve discovered, this one is particularly exciting. Not only because it exists in the habitable zone and is the size of the earth, but also because of how it behaves with the neighboring planet, says Vanderburg.
The Kepler telescope stopped working in 2018 after nine years of service. By then I had found more than 2,000 planets outside our solar system.
One of Kepler’s latest analyzes estimated that between 20 and 50 percent of the stars we can see in the night sky likely have small, rocky planets the size of Earth in habitable zones.
“This fascinating and distant globe gives us even greater hope that a new earth is among the stars waiting to be found,” says Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.