HARROW: Astronomers have discovered a rocky planet that is orbiting a small star that has many similarities to Earth and Venus.
Back in May, a team of researchers using the MEarth-South telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile identified the the exoplanet named GJ 1132b that is only about 39 light-years away, making it the closest exoplanet that has yet to be discovered.
Published recently in the journal Nature, astrophysicists from MIT and other astronomers found that GJ 1132b is only 1.2 times the size of the Earth, has a mass about 1.6 times that of the Earth, and orbits a parent star. It takes 1.6 days for it take make a single trip around the red dwarf Gliese 1132.
Just like the moon’s tides are locked to our planet, the Earth-sized exoplanet also is tidally locked, which simply means it has a day and a night side, depending on which side is facing its star while in orbit.
There is no denying GJ 1132b’s similarities to the Earth, but it can actually pass as a cousin to another planet in our solar system, Venus.
The planet orbits very close it its parent star, giving it a surface temperature much hotter than Earth’s at about 440 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth, but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus,” astronomer David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a statement. “We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere, too, and if it does we can’t wait to get a whiff.”
