Astronomers have discovered a very unusual Earth-sized world orbiting a star just 31 light-years away. Whether exoplanets meet the conditions necessary for the birth of life.
Although that information is not yet available, it is a promising candidate world for searching for biosignatures present in near-Earth-mass exoplanets in the future.
The search for exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, is hampered by the limitations of current technology. But the main method for finding exoplanets is better at finding big stars than small ones.
This is because we rely on indirect signals from the exoplanet’s influence on the host star. The transit method is a method that detects the faint dips in starlight that occur when exoplanets orbit between their stars and us.
In addition, the radial velocity method is a method that detects slight changes in the wavelength of light when a star moves very slightly in its field due to gravitational interactions with extrasolar planets.
So, at the time of writing this article, more than 5,200 exoplanets have been identified, and less than 1.5% of them have a mass less than two Earths.
About a dozen of them orbit at temperatures that are neither hot enough to burn nor cold enough to freeze, but hot enough for liquid water to exist on their surface.
Whether or not it is in the so-called habitable zone is the first step in determining whether or not life can exist.
This is what a team of astronomers led by Diana Kosakowski at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomers (MPIA) discovered about the nearby red dwarf star Wolf 1069.
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