2 Earth-Like Planets Found in Part of Universe Where Life Could Survive

An image of Saturn's haze-shrouded moon, Titan, taken by the Cassini spacecraft. (NASA)

A team of international scientists led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered two earth-like planets orbiting a red dwarf star that lies within the habitability zone of the star.

The newly discovered planets, GJ 1002b and GJ 1002c, are orbiting the star GJ 1002 which is located less than 16 light years from the solar system. Both planets have masses similar to Earth. While the GJ 1002b takes a bit more than 10 days to orbit the star, GJ 1002c takes double the time at more than 21 days.

The GJ 1002 is a star that barely has an eighth of the mass of the sun. Being a cool and faint star, the habitability zone is also quite close to it.

“Nature seems bent on showing us that Earth-like planets are very common. With these two we now know [seven] in planetary systems quite near to the sun,” said Alejandro Suarez Mascareno, an IAC researcher, according to a Dec. 15 IAC news release.

The proximity of the star to Earth’s solar system means the two planets are excellent candidates for characterization of their atmospheres, either based on thermal emission or reflected light.

The Discovery

The discovery was made from two space-gazing instruments, the Carmenes (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs) and Espresso (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations).

The star GJ 1002 was observed by Carmenes between 2017 and 2019, with Espresso watching it between 2019 and 2021.

“Because of its low temperature, the visible light from GJ 1002 is too faint to measure its variations in velocity with the majority of spectrographs,” said Ignasi Ribas, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), according to the release.

Carmenes is superior to other spectrographs aimed at detecting variations in the velocities of stars thanks to its wider range of sensitivity of near-infrared wavelengths. This allowed it to study the star from the Calar Alto observatory in Spain.

During the four years between 2017 and 2021, the research team used 139 spectroscopic observations, which refer to deep space radiation measurements, to identify the planets, according to Science Alert. Due to the relative proximity of GJ 1002b and GJ 1002c, more detailed observations are easier to do.

Watery Planet

The discovery of GJ 1002b and GJ 1002c comes months after a potential watery planet was identified. In August, an international team of researchers led by Charles Cadieux, a Ph.D. student at the Universite de Montreal, announced the discovery of an exoplanet that likely contains water in liquid form.

The exoplanet, TOI-1452b, is orbiting TOI-1452, a star from a binary system located in the Draco constellation roughly 100 light years from earth. Slightly greater in mass and size than the earth, the planet is located at a distance from the star in a way that the temperature would neither be too hot nor too cold for it to harbor liquid water on the surface.

“TOI-1452 b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date,” said Cadieux, according to a university news release. “Its radius and mass suggest a much lower density than what one would expect for a planet that is basically made up of metal and rock, like Earth.”

According to certain specialists at the university, their analysis of the planet shows that up to 30 percent of its mass might be made up of water, which is similar to Saturn’s moon, Titan, and Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede.