Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur
Astronomers have discovered an Earth-size planet that is showered with so much radiation, its atmosphere eroded away long ago, leaving it bare. Life as we know it can't exist on this blistering world, but astronomers are interested in it for another reason: For the first time, they may be able to study the geology of a planet outside our solar system.
"Life as we know it could not emerge on the surface of the planet — atmosphere or not — because it could not sustain large amounts of water in liquid form," study lead author Michaël Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, told Live Science."It is a bare rock planet like Mercury."
The researchers"searched intensively" for planetary siblings of SPECULOOS-3 b in the same star system but did not find any, Gillon said. He noted that those additional planets may exist but are simply too small or too far out from their host star to be seen. The project's main goal is to detect rocky planets orbiting ultracool dwarf stars, whose tiny size makes it easier for telescopes to detect orbiting planets. In addition to being thousands of degrees cooler than the sun and hundreds of times dimmer, they burn through their fuel slowly and end up living far longer — around 100 billion years.
"If there's no atmosphere, there would be no blue sky or clouds — it would just be dark, like on the surface of the moon,"" study co-author Benjamin Rackham, a research scientist at MIT, said in a separate statement from MIT."And the ‘sun' would be a big, purplish-red, spotted, and flaring star that would look about 18 times as big as the sun looks to us in the sky.
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