Scientists discover an exoplanet similar to Earth with conditions suitable for water and life

Geneva – An international team of scientists that includes experts from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), a pioneer center in the search for Exoplanetsannounced the discovery of one of these stars outside the solar system with conditions suitable for water and life, although only sometimes, due to its eccentric orbit.

The planet HD20794D, rocky and superior in size to the earth, revolves around a G -type star, such as the sun, at a distance of 19.7 light years, which on the universal scale is considered “next neighborhood” of the solar system , indicated a state statement that explains the finding published in the magazine “Astronomy & Astrophisics”.

Due to the orbit of the planet with respect to its star, it becomes at a minimum distance of 112 million kilometers with respect to its “sun” and a maximum of 300 million kilometers.

Taking into account the size of the star whose exoplanet has been discovered, it is considered that the “habitable” area would be, as in the solar system, approximately between 100 and 225 million kilometers (the earth is 150 million kilometers from Sol), which implies that the discovered star would not always be “habitable.”

“Its configuration is of special interest for astronomers to adjust theoretical models and their notions about the habitability of a planet. If HD20794D had water, it would pass from the icy state to the liquid, leading to the appearance of life, during its turn around its star, ”said Unige.

The researcher at the Xavier Dumusque University, of the Astronomy Department and co -author of the study on the exoplanet, stressed that his luminosity and proximity make the star an ideal candidate for future telescopes with the mission of observing the atmospheres of this type of space objects.

In this sense, the star could be suitable for the installation of state -of -the -art spectrographers such as the Andes, in order to support projects such as the extremely large telescope (elt) of the Southern European Observatory.

The Exoplaneta, whose research also participated in the Swiss NCCR PAnet Research Center, has been discovered thanks to the analysis of data collected for 20 years by instruments such as spectrographs for the search for espresso planets and HARPs and simplified by algorithms of the own Just.

The researchers at the Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz University Ginebrin discovered in 1995 the first exoplanet confirmed until then, an achievement that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.

In the three decades since then, experts from the institution and many others in the world have continued to discover distant planets, with their eyes also put in the search for life outside the earth.

More than 7,000 exoplanets are known for now in the universe, but their real number must be much greater considering that only in our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are hundreds of billions of stars, and science theorizes that all of them are susceptible to having planetary systems such as the sun.