Earth-like exoplanet ever discovered possibly most important – Het Nieuwsblad

                 A rocky planet the size of Earth was discovered in a nearby small star. Astronomers would be the main exoplanet could ever be.
             

         

The planet was named GJ 1132b, and is thirty-nine light years away. That is three times closer than any other Earth-like planet ever found. Astronomers hope they at that distance by using telescopes to study the chemical composition of the planet.

GJ 1132b is only sixteen percent larger than Earth and is similar in mass too heavily on our planet. They circling around a star which is only a fifth as big as the sun. While this star is cooler than the Sun, orbiting GJ 1132b so close to it that the surface temperature of up to 260 degrees Celsius.

Due to the high temperature, it is impossible that the planet’s water – and therefore life – contains. However, it is possible that an atmosphere is present. This also has the consequence that the exoplanet bad 1.6 (rounded 2) days sures to orbit around its star as the Earth needs 365 days to orbit the sun.

“If the planet has an atmosphere, we can also find other, cooler planets with an atmosphere around small circle,” says Zachory Berta-Thompson of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We can then search for molecules generated by life.”

Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, says that it is probably the most important planet ever found outside our solar system. “Because the planet is so close and circling around a small star, we can explore the planet with unprecedented accuracy,” he says.