HARROW: A small planet, just a bit bigger than Earth, has been spotted in our stellar neighbourhood, just 39 light-years away.
Known as GJ 1132b, it is the closest rocky exoplanet to have ever been found, and astronomers say it could provide our most in-depth look yet at an alien world not so different than our own.
Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, was so excited about the findings, published this week in Nature, that he described the new world as “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system” in an accompanying News and Views article.
The newly discovered planet is just 16 per cent larger than Earth, and it is made of rock and metal like our own planet. However, scientists say it is not likely to host life as we know it.
Its small, dim, sun is just one-fifth the size of our own sun, but GJ 1132b circles it at a distance of just 1.4 million miles, completing a full orbit once every 1.6 Earth days. (For perspective, Mercury orbits our sun from a distance of 36 million miles.)
The exoplanet’s close proximity to its host star keeps its temperature at a broiling 260 degrees Celsius — or about as hot as the highest setting on your home oven, said Zachory Berta-Thompson, a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
At that temperature, liquid water cannot exist on the planet’s surface, although scientists say it is likely the planet still has an atmosphere.
