If humans are ever to live on the newly-discovered planet, they better find a way to cope with the cold, as boffins think temperatures could be potentially below -70C on the ground
It’s a giant leap for mankind, as astronomers have discovered what they believe is a potentially habitable second Earth. The new planet they have found is 146 light-years away orbiting a sun-like star.
But if humans are ever to live there they better find a way to cope with the cold, as boffins think temperatures could be potentially below -70C on the surface. The researchers have named the planet HD 137010 b and estimate it is 6% larger than Earth with conditions similar to Mars.
An international team of scientists from the UK, the US, Australia and Denmark identified it using data captured in 2017 by the Nasa Kepler space telescope’s extended mission, known as K2. They believe the planet has “about a 50% chance of residing in the habitable zone” of the star it orbits.
Dr Chelsea Huang, of the University of Southern Queensland in Oz, is one of the co-authors of the research published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. He said the team’s first reaction to the discovery was “that this cannot possibly be true” and they learnt it has an orbit similar to Earth’s, of about 355 days.
Dr Huang said: “We double checked and triple checked everything and it’s a textbook example of a transit of a planet. What’s very exciting about this particular Earth-sized planet is that its star is only [about] 150 light-years away from our solar system.
“The next best planet around a sun-like star, in a habitable zone, [Kepler-186f] is about four times farther away and 20 times fainter.” He revealed the brightness and closeness of the star it orbits puts it “within reach of [being observed with] the next generation of telescopes”.
Dr Huang added: “I’m sure this will be the first target to be observed when the technology gets there.” The research was welcomed by Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University, who hailed it as “very exciting”.
However, she said more results are needed to classify the candidate planet to determine if it is Earth-like or has surface temperatures more similar to Mars and potentially below -70C. Dr Webb: “It could be something called a super snowball.
“Essentially, a big, icy world that potentially has a lot of water, but a lot of it is frozen. If we were to try and get there, it would take us tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years travelling at the current speeds that we can.”
This is not the first time that a similar planet has been spotted by scientists, after a mysterious “super-Earth” planet that appears to flash a repeated signal from 154 light-years away was discovered by boffins — and it may support life. The planet, named TOI-1846 b, is roughly four times the size of Earth and orbits around a small red dwarf star every four days.
Mr Soubkiou, lead researcher at Oukaimeden Observatory in Morocco who helped to find the mysterious planet, said: “We have validated TOI-1846 b using TESS and multicolour ground-based photometric data, high-resolution imaging, and spectroscopic observations.” However, boffins believe that its equilibrium temperature — an estimated temperature of the planet’s surface with no atmosphere — is really hot, with suggestions it may be 295C.
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