Planet 5-7 times size of Earth found in the nearest star system?
Planet 5-7 times size of Earth found in the nearest star system?
Chethan Kumar | TNN | Feb 11, 2021, 22:30 IST
Representative image
Astronomers from Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical programme looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars say there’s an “intriguing possibility” of them having observed a planet roughly five to seven times the size of Earth orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest sun-like star, just 4.37 light years away.
Breakthrough Watch which has now announced a new observing technique with unprecedented sensitivity to directly image exoplanets says initial observations also resulted in the detection of a weak signal in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A, part of the star system nearest to Earth.
Since 1995 when exoplanet explorers from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz –who were recently awarded half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of a planet orbiting a sunlike star named 51 Pegasi– thousands of extrasolar planets have been found, including potentially Earth-like worlds, along with bizarre objects that bear no resemblance to any of the planets in our solar system.
Twenty-Six Years Later…
Twenty-six years later, it is now possible to capture images of planets that could potentially sustain life around nearby stars using a newly developed system for mid-infrared exoplanet imaging. In tandem with a very long observation time, a new study’s authors say they can now use ground-based telescopes to directly capture images of planets about three times the size of Earth within the habitable zones of nearby stars.