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Newly Discovered Rocky Exoplanet May Have Atmosphere
A team of astronomers has found a nearby exoplanet similar to Earth that might have an atmosphere.
In recent decades, astronomers have detected thousands of exoplanets (planets around stars other than our sun) in the hope of finding some that may be habitable for lives like those on Earth. However, only a very few of the exoplanets detected so far are Earth-like, and it is difficult to study their atmospheres.
This newly discovered planet may be different.
The discovery was reported in a paper published recently in the journal Science. The planet, referred to as Gliese 486b, is a super-Earth exoplanet, meaning it is more massive than Earth but not as massive as Uranus and Neptune.
MAROON-X instrument built by UChicago team measures its first planet
In the past two decades, scientists have discovered more and more planets orbiting distant stars but in some sense, they’re still just dots on a map.
“It’s kind of like looking at a map of Europe and seeing the dot that’s labeled ‘Paris,’” said University of Chicago astrophysicist Jacob Bean. “You know where it is, but there’s a whole lot that you’re missing about the city.”
Scientists are developing new telescopes and instruments to fill in more and more of that picture. Bean led the creation of one such instrument called MAROON-X, which was installed at the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii last year. It allowed scientists to not only confirm the existence of the third-nearest star with a transiting exoplanet, but to take extraordinarily precise measurements of that planet and discover that it is rocky like Earth.