The exoplanet lies just at the edge of its star’s habitable zone.
An international team of astronomers led by the Japan Center for Astrobiology discovered a rocky exoplanet nearly the same size as Earth just 22 parsecs (71.75 light-years) away. The planet, named K2-415b, orbits a very common type of M5-class red dwarf star called K2-415.. Comparison with Earth could reveal how planets similar to ours form and evolve in very different systems.
K2-415 has only 16 percent the mass of the Sun and is one of the smallest stars found to be orbited by an exoplanet the size of our own (K2-415b is 1,015 times the radius of Earth). The density of K2-415b is much greater than that of Earth, since it has approximately between three and seven times its mass.. The exoplanet completes the orbit of its dwarf star in four days, they published last Friday in an article available on the arXiv preprint server that will be definitively published in The Astronomical Journal.
The exoplanet was first detected in 2017 with the Kepler telescope and its in-depth study was recently conducted by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), successor to Kepler. K2-415b lies just at the edge of K2-415’s habitable zone.which could mean it still has atmosphere to plumb.
an interesting goal
“Small planets around M dwarfs are a good laboratory for exploring the atmospheric diversity of rocky planets and the conditions under which a habitable terrestrial planet can exist,” the study authors wrote. “As one of the lowest mass stars known to host a transiting planet the size of Earth, the K2-415 will be an interesting target for future follow-up observations.including additional monitoring of radial velocity and transit spectroscopy,” they added.
Finding low-mass planets is a great challenge. Astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets to date, but only 1.5% of them have masses less than two Earth masses, and only about a dozen of them are in the so-called habitable zone around their star.
Source: RT
