There’s no better place which could be considered as a target place for aliens- said the researchers.
According to scientists, the newly-discovered planet is the best candidate to support alien life.
This super-Earth planet is named LHS1140 and is considered the most intriguing exoplanet ever seen. Researchers who discovered it claim that this is actually the most hopeful place of finding aliens.
The planet is ten times more close to its star than our planet is. However, its sun is a red dwarf, so it just receives about half the amount of sunlight and is settled right in the center of the habitable zone.
Researchers have been searching for evidence of life some other place aside the Earth for decades and this is the closest option they’ve come across to. Lead author of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Jason Dittmann, announced that this was the most astonishing exoplanet he’s seen in the last ten years.
“We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science — searching for evidence of life beyond Earth.”- he said.
The star named LHS1140 is settled in the constellation Cetus or the sea monster. Right now the star is at a point which shows it would be especially useful and supportive to alien life.
“The present conditions of the red dwarf are particularly favourable — LHS 1140 spins more slowly and emits less high-energy radiation than other similar low-mass stars,” stated team member Nicola Astudillo-Defru from the Geneva Observatory, Switzerland.
The star was discovered when scientists noticed that it was blocking out a little of the sun’s light when passing in front of it every 25 days. Its orbit is noticed nearly edge-on from the Earth, which means it’s easy to be spotted.
The star has the capacities to provide the planet with the two essential things for life-an atmosphere and water. Normally, red dwarfs would emit radiation which could cause damage to any environment – but the new star is big enough to support a magma ocean on its surface. The ocean would vaporize and steam would be sent into the atmosphere. Then the atmosphere would restore the water to the ocean and the cycle would start again.
The astronomers who found the super-Earth said that it’s about five billion years old. Its diameter is about 1.4 times larger than Earth. But since the planet has much bigger mass and density, astronomers suppose it’s possibly made of rock and has a dense iron core.
The researchers assert us that the planet is perhaps a better candidate to support alien life than Trappist-1 and Proxima b which were considered best hope before.
In order to confirm precisely how much radiation falls on the planet and decide whether it’s convenient for supporting life, scientists could use new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Even better, for years to come, scientists will be lucky to take advantage of new and more powerful equipment such as the Extremely Large Telescope and receive meticulous pictures of the atmospheres of the exoplanets, and finally figure out what life beyond Earth may look like.
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