Just this month astronomers discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star at the same distance our own planet orbits our sun. It was captured using the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The telescope itself uses a technique called gravitational microlensing that involves detecting objects orbiting a background star by first detecting the gravity of a foreground star. The planet’s official name is OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb and is the lowest-mass planet that we’ve ever detected through the use of microlensing.
“One of the problems with estimating how many planets like this are out there is that we have reached the lower limit of planet masses that we can currently detect with microlensing,” says Yossi Shvartzvald, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The planet is orbiting an object so small that scientists aren’t exactly sure what it is. One suggestion is that it’s a brown dwarf as is less than 8 percent the mass of the sun. Brown dwarfs are essentially objects that are too big to be planets but too small to be stars (even though they form in the same way as regular stars).
NASA said in a statement, “Alternatively, it could be an ultra-cool dwarf star much like TRAPPIST-1, which Spitzer and ground-based telescopes recently revealed to host seven Earth-size planets. Those seven planets all huddle closely around TRAPPIST-1, even closer than Mercury orbits our sun, and they all have the potential for liquid water. But OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb, at the sun-Earth distance from a very faint star, would be extremely cold – likely even colder than Pluto is in our own solar system, such that any surface water would be frozen.”
Related Links;
- Icy Earth-mass exoplanet is ‘colder than Hoth’ / CNN
- ‘Iceball’ Planet Discovered Through Microlensing / NASA
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