Gliese 12 b is 40 light years from Earth and orbits a cool red dwarf star. Scientists believe that the temperature on its surface may be around 42 degrees.
Another special world has been discovered outside our Solar System. It is a relatively close exoplanet, as it is 40 light years away, with a size similar to that of Venus and Earth. But the characteristic that makes it most interesting for astronomers is that it is located in the habitable zone of its star, that is, at a suitable distance so that there could be liquid water and life.
Spanish scientists from the Astrobiology Center (CAB-CSIC/INTA) are part of the international team that discovered this planet, whose details are published this Thursday in the magazine The
Astrophysical Journal.
For Masayuki Kuzuhara, assistant professor at the Tokyo Astrobiology Center and co-author of the research, it is the “closest, transiting, temperate, Earth-sized world located to date.” Although he admits that they still don’t know if it has an atmosphere, he compares it to “an exo-Venus, with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbor in the Solar System.”
Its star is a star called Gliese 12, a cold red dwarf located in the constellation of Pisces, which the planet takes 12.8 days to orbit. According to this team’s estimates, the size of the star is equivalent to that of a quarter of the Sun, and its temperature is also lower than that of our star – approximately 60%.
According to its discoverers, if it had no atmosphere, the planet’s surface would have a temperature of about 42 degrees, equivalent to that of a hot day in Spain.
“Gliese 12 b represents one of the best targets to study whether Earth-sized planetsthat orbit around cold stars can preserve their atmospheres, a crucial step to advance our understanding of the habitability of the planets in our galaxy,” José Antonio Caballero, astrophysicist at the Astrobiology Center in Madrid, explained in a press release. and also co-author.
The discovery was made thanks to observations from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) satellite and other observatories and due to its promising characteristics, astronomers will continue to delve deeper into it with the space telescope. James Webb.
