Astronomers from the Subaru Strategic Program have discovered a possible Super Earth 37 light years from Earth. The discovery was made with the IRD Infrared Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope (IRD-SSP) in Hawaii. NASA Exoplanets tweeted Thursday morning that a Super Earth had been discovered in the habitable zone of its red dwarf star.
Discovery Alert! A newly discovered exoplanet moves in and out of its star’s habitable zone. It is 37 light-years from Earth and about four times the mass of our planet, making Ross 508b a super-Earth. One year there, one orbit, takes only 10.8 days! pic.twitter.com/MW7Cap45If
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 3, 2022
The exoplanet is about four times the mass of our planet and presented us with a problem – “it is moving in and out of the habitable zone of its star”. The planet – named Ross 508b – shows constant movement in and out of its habitable zone, but there is still a chance it may hold water on its surface, and as the James Webb Space Telescope gets underway, this could prove to be a crucial find.
The distance from a star at which liquid water can exist on the surfaces of orbiting planets is called the habitable zone. Habitable zones, also called “Goldilocks zones,” may have ideal conditions for life to thrive because they are neither too hot nor too cold.
Ross 508b passes through this zone in its orbit around the star.
The exoplanet orbits a star with one-fifth the mass of the Sun. Located at the inner edge of its habitable zone, the average distance from the central star is 0.05 times the Earth-Sun distance.
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Ross 508 b is the result of renewed emphasis on red dwarf stars, which make up three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy and are abundant near the Solar System.
“Ross 508 b is the first successful detection of a super-Earth using only near-infrared spectroscopy. Previously, in the detection of low-mass planets such as super-Earths, near-infrared observations alone were not sufficiently accurate, and verification by high-precision line-of-sight velocity measurements in visible light was required. This study shows that the IRD -SSP alone is capable of detecting planets and clearly demonstrates the advantage of IRD-SSP in its ability to search with high precision even for late-type red dwarfs that are too faint to be observed with visible light.” says Dr. Hiroki Harakawa (NAOJ Subaru Telescope), lead author of the discovery paper.
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Their limited emission helps extend the life of such dwarf stars, but they are considered crucial targets for the study of life in the universe. These stars have a surface temperature below 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. Proxima Centauri b is currently the only other exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.
According to the researchers, the planet probably has an elliptical orbit. Its orbital period, or revolutionary period, is just 10.8 days, NASA’s Exoplanet tweet said.
“Although current telescopes cannot directly image the planet due to its proximity to the central star. In the future, it will be one of the targets to search for life by 30-meter-class telescopes,” the team said.
“It has been 14 years since the development of the IRD began. We continued our development and research in hopes of finding a planet just like Ross 508 b. We are committed to making new discoveries,” said Professor Bun’ei Sato, Research Director of the IRD-SSP.
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