Space and astronomy news
The parade of interesting new exoplanets continues. Today, NASA issued a press release announcing the discovery of a new exoplanet in the Gliese 12 system, sized somewhere between Earth and Venus and inside the host star’s habitable zone. Two papers detail the discovery, but both teams think that the planet is an excellent candidate for follow-up with the James Webb Space Telescope to try to tease out whether it has an atmosphere and, if so, what that atmosphere is made of.
Gliese 12 is a red dwarf, only weighing about 27% of the Sun’s weight. Due to the intricacies of fusion, this amounts to the star outputting about 60% of the light of our Sun, which, in turn, means its habitable zone is much closer than our own. The planet, known as Gliese 12b, orbits its parent star once every 12.8 days. But more importantly, it receives about 85% of the energy that Venus typically receives from the Sun.The similarity between our closest neighbor and this exoplanet is striking.
One of the holy grails of astrobiology is to find an Earth analog, where the solar radiation, day length, size, atmospheric makeup, and other factors are similar enough for a reasonable chance for life to evolve. We can quickly determine many of those numbers, such as orbit, size, and the amount of solar radiation a planet receives. But finding details like atmospheric makeup is harder.
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