New Exoplanet With Potential Signs of Life Discovered; Earth-Sized Habitable World Is 31 Light-years Away

A new exoplanet could be the next habitable zone that researchers have been looking for, according to a report.

Earth-Sized New Exoplanet Shows Signs of Life

Astronomers have been exploring space and found a new exoplanet that exhibited signs of life. It is about the size of Earth and is 31 light-years away, Science Alert reported.

The information is not available yet, but it presents a promising feature for future searches for biosignatures on nearby, Earth-mass exoplanets.

The search for exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, those beyond our Solar System, is hampered by the technological limits of the present day. This technology is undoubtedly remarkable; nonetheless, our basic methods for locating exoplanets are significantly better at locating huge worlds than small ones.

They rely on indirect signals, such as an exoplanet's effects on its host star, to determine its existence. The transit method detects the extremely faint, regular dips in starlight as an exoplanet orbits between us and its star, whereas the radial velocity method detects minute changes in the wavelength of light as the star is very, very slightly displaced by the gravitational interaction with the exoplanet.

At the time of writing, more than 5,200 exoplanets have been confirmed, yet less than 1.5% of them have masses less than that of two Earths.

Among those, a dozen are orbiting their stars at a distance where temperatures could allow liquid water on the surface where it's not so hot that it burns off nor so cold that it freezes.

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Red Dwarf Star Wolf 1069 Discovered

A planet's placement within the so-called habitable zone is the first step in determining its potential habitability. A team of German astronomers led by Diana Kossakowski of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has discovered this about the neighboring red dwarf star Wolf 1069, which is 1.36 times the mass of the Earth.

According to Kossakowski, when they evaluated the data of Wolf 1069, they discovered that it has a low-amplitude signal. It orbits the star every 15.6 days at a distance equal to one-fifteenth between the Earth and the Sun.

Despite the fact that Wolf 1069b is 15 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, the amount of radiation it receives is approximately 65 percent of what Earth receives.

It is believed that the red planet's thin atmosphere is due to its lack of a global magnetic field similar to Earth's. (Venus also lacks an internal magnetic field, but its interaction with the solar wind generates an outward field. It's Venus's fault.)

Rotating, convecting, and conducting fluids within the planet's core transform kinetic energy into magnetic energy, generating an internal magnetic field. Wolf 1069b probably possesses one.

Approximately five percent of all emerging planetary systems orbiting low-mass stars, like Wolf 1069, end up with a single detectable planet," according to astronomer Remo Burn of the MPIA.

Throughout the creation of the planetary system, simulations revealed a phase of violent interactions with planetary embryos, which occasionally culminated in catastrophic collisions.

These collisions would heat the young planet, implying that Wolf 1069b's core is still liquid, like Earth's, and is capable of producing a magnetic field.

According to Sky at Night, there are seven features that make a planet habitable, and the magnetic field is one. It protects the surface line from the lethal effects of charged particles in the solar wind and cosmic rays.

However, according to Kossakowski, Wolf 1069b doesn't pass between us and its star, so there is no way to probe its atmosphere. It might take another decade to make progress in studying the exoplanet. He stressed the importance of developing our facilities since most of the closest potentially habitable worlds are detected via the radial velocity method only.

The study has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.