discovered the first potentially habitable planet outside our solar system.
Astronomers at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the planet, just discovered a planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, just 20 light years Earth. Located in the constellation Libra. The orbit is allowed that had water on its surface and that is potentially habitable.
With a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days, the planet has been named Gliese 581g.
Gliese 581g If you have a rocky composition similar to Earth, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of Earth, and possess a sufficient gravity to retain an atmosphere, according to Steven Vogt professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The surface gravity would be roughly equal or slightly superior to that of Earth, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, "said Vogt. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so close tells us that planets like this should be really common.
However, not all of the planet would be habitable for humans: only a part. And is that one side always faces the star and the other always in darkness, so its climate is extremely hot and cold respectively. However, the intermediate zone between the two would be habitable.
been discovered by analyzing 11 years of observations with a high resolution spectrometer Eschelles Keck Telescope, located in the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The spectrometer, which was designed by Vogt, measured the radial velocity of the star, ie its movement toward or away from Earth.
0 comments:
Post a Comment