Breaking Update: Here’s a clear explanation of the latest developments related to Breaking News:Potentially habitable planet found 146 light-years away, but with -70C temperatures– What Just Happened and why it matters right now.
The planet was identified by an international team of scientists in the UK, the US, Australia and Denmark using data captured in 2017 by the NASA Kepler space telescope’s K2 mission, The Guardian reported.
The Kepler telescope was retired in 2018. A new paper detailing the research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last week.
The planet has close to “a 50% chance of residing in the habitable zone” of the star it orbits, researchers say. Its orbit is similar to that of the Earth.
Conditions on planet HD 137010 b
According to
NASA, this could turn out to be the first exoplanet (planet orbiting other stars) with Earth-like properties that revolves around a Sun-like star, which is near enough and bright enough for meaningful follow-up observations.
The star that HD 137010 b orbits is cooler and dimmer than the Sun, meaning that it receives much less heat and light than the Earth does. The planet’s surface temperature is similar to Mars and could go below -70 °C.
Despite the possibility of a frigid climate, HD 137010 b could turn out to be a temperate or watery world if the atmosphere is richer in carbon dioxide compared to Earth. The planet has been given a 40% chance of having a ‘conservative’ habitable zone around its star, and a 51% chance of being in a more ‘optimistic’ habitable zone.
Impact of the discovery
Dr Chelsea Huang, a researcher at Australia’s University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and one of the co-authors of the research, told The Guardian, “What’s very exciting about this particular Earth-sized planet is that its star is only [about] 150 light-years away from our solar system.” She explained that the next best alternative, Kepler-186f, is about 20 times fainter and four times farther away.
Further observations will be required for HD 137010 b to be promoted from a ‘candidate’ to ‘confirmed’ status. Only a single transit of the planet was detected so far.
Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University, told The Guardian that even if the planet demonstrates an Earth-like atmosphere, it would still take humans “tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years” to reach it at the current speed of space travel.