New Earth-Sized Planet Orbiting an Ultracool Red Dwarf Star Discovered

A new, Earth-sized planet was recently discovered. It was orbiting in an ultra-cool red dwarf star 55 light years away.

New Earth-Sized World Discovered

The planet SPECULOOS-3 b is the second of its kind found orbiting this kind of star. It takes about 17 hours for the planet to complete an orbit of its star, which is more than twice as cold as the Sun, ten times lighter, and a hundred times less brilliant than our sun.

On SPECULOOS-3 b, day and night seem never to stop because the planet is probably tidally locked, meaning that the same side, or "dayside," always faces the star in a manner like that of the moon and Earth.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Bern, and Liège, Belgium, are partners in the SPECULOOS project, which discovered the finding. The goal of SPECULOOS (Search for Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) is to use a global network of robotic telescopes to look for exoplanets orbiting ultra-cool dwarf stars.

Roughly 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are ultra-cool dwarf stars, which are incredibly frequent. However, because they are also fragile and dispersed throughout the sky, scientists must use telescope data to monitor each star separately over several weeks to find transiting planets.

According to Amaury Triaud, a professor of exoplanetology at the University of Birmingham, ultra-cool dwarf stars are smaller and colder than our Sun. Still, they have a lifespan over a hundred times longer than our Suns—roughly 100 billion years—and are predicted to be the last stars in the universe. The discovery of SPECULOOS-3 demonstrates the effectiveness of the global network and the readiness to detect more rocky worlds orbiting shallow-mass stars.

Even though most astronomical data is automatically analyzed and algorithms frequently find planetary candidates before human assessment, this instance did not occur. The SPECULOOS team members had developed the practice of quickly scanning the nightly data as soon as they were available. This is how Dr. Georgina Dransfield, a postdoctoral researcher based in Birmingham and a former PhD student at the University of Birmingham, discovered the planetary signal and informed the entire collaboration.

"The small size of ultra-cool dwarfs makes it easier to detect small planets. SPECULOOS-3b is special in that its stellar and planetary properties make it an optimal target for JWST, which is capable to get information about the composition of the rocks that make its surface," said Dransfield.

Future phases of the study might involve further James Webb Space Telescope observations, which could provide crucial information about the planet's surface mineralogy and the possibility of an atmosphere.

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Earth-Sized Rogue Planets More Common Than Expected Based on Recent Projections

A future NASA satellite telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is expected to detect about 400 Earth-mass worlds that have "gone rogue" and are now solitary in our galaxy. The Milky Way is where all of these hidden worlds are.

Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory designed to investigate a broad spectrum of infrared astrophysics problems, locate and image exoplanets, and get additional insights into dark energy and matter. It will have a 100-fold wider field of view than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Trillions of rogue planets are thought to be traveling alone in our galaxy, according to David Bennett, a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-author of two papers detailing the findings. This indicates that there are 20 times as many rogue planets in our galaxy as stars. There has never been a measurement of the number of rogue planets in the universe, but they appear more common than previously thought.