• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Earth-Sized World Found Around Star That Will Live 100 Billion Years

May 16, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Astronomers are reporting the discovery of SPECULOOS-3b, an Earth-sized planet that orbits an ultracool dwarf, a star not much bigger than Jupiter. This is the only second known system such as this. The other one is the well-known TRAPPIST-1, which sports seven Earth-sized planets. The new system is 55 light-years away.

Advertisement

The star has a surface that is twice as cold as the Sun’s own, and that makes it about 1,000 times dimmer. But the planet is a lot closer to it than Earth is to the Sun. It goes around its star in just 17 hours and it is blasted by 16 times more radiation per second than our planet.

Advertisement

It’s likely this is only on one side, because orbiting so close, the planet is expected to be tidally locked like the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. One side of SPECULOOS-3b is in perennial night while the other is in constant light. But this gives astronomers an opportunity to study it directly.

“We can say from our spectra and other observations that the star has a temperature of about 2,800 kelvins, it is about 7 billion years old – not too young, and not too old – and it is moderately active, meaning that it flares quite a lot,” co-author Benjamin Rackham from MIT said in a statement. “We think the planet must not have an atmosphere anymore because it would easily have been eroded away by the activity of the host star that’s basically constantly flaring.”

While an atmosphere seems unlikely, there is an even more exciting possibility for this world. The team believes that by observing the planet going behind the star 10 times with JWST, they will be able to confirm whether it has an atmosphere or not. If it doesn’t, they might be able to study its rocks. And that would be a first.

“If there’s no atmosphere, there would be no blue sky or clouds – it would just be dark, like on the surface of the moon,” Rackham explained. “And the ‘sun’ would be a big, purplish-red, spotted, and flaring star that would look about 18 times as big as the sun looks to us in the sky.”

Advertisement

“SPECULOOS-3b is the first planet for which we can consider moving toward constraining surface properties of planets beyond the Solar System,” added study co-author Julien de Wit, associate professor of planetary sciences at MIT. “With this world, we could basically start doing exoplanetary geology. How cool is that?”



Understanding the composition of a world in another solar system is extremely important. We could learn how similar or different rocky planets elsewhere are, and whether all of them have the ingredients that might make life. The star is also the most common type of star in the galaxy (70 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way) and it is supposed to live 10 times as long as our Sun. Understanding habitability conditions around it will tell us how likely life elsewhere is. 

The study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Futures up, Wall Street tries to recover after sharp selloff
  2. Scientists Explain Why Tourists Should Be Banned From Having Sex In Space
  3. Many Physicists Assume We Must Live In A Multiverse – But Their Basic Maths May Be Wrong
  4. Brand New Species Of Delightful Sea Creature Discovered Off The British Coast

Source Link: Earth-Sized World Found Around Star That Will Live 100 Billion Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version