New Planet May Be Habitable: NASA Finds TOI 700 – 01/12/2023 – Science

announced by NASA (US Space Agency) planet discovery Earth-like in size and potentially habitable. The planet, called TOI 700 e, orbits a region where liquid water is possible, which is crucial to the existence of life as we know it.

At 95% the size of Earth, the “e” in the planet’s name is a differentiation from three other companions the agency had previously found in the same system, TOI 700 planets b, c, and d—the latter also in habitable area. But discovering the new star required an extra year of observation.

“This is one of the few systems with many habitable planetesimals that we know of,” Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located in Southern California, who led the work, said last Tuesday (10).

According to Gilbert, observations of the new planet pave the way for other discoveries.

Planet ‘e’ is about 10% smaller than ‘d’. [satélite] TESS helps us find smaller and smaller worlds,” he says. TESS (Exoplanet Research Satellite, free translation) is in its second year of its mission, and it helps us name planets, since TOI is an English acronym for “Tess’s Object of Interest.” “

TOI 700 is the name of a dwarf star located in the southern constellation of Dorado, 100 light-years away. distance from the ground. Planet “e” has an orbit of 28 days and is probably rocky.

Planet ‘d’, also in the habitable zone, is the size of Earth and orbits in 37 days. TOI 700 c is 2.5 times larger than Earth and completes an orbit every 16 days. The letter “b”, in turn, represents the size of our planet by 90% and an orbit of 10 days.

According to NASA, these planets, including the newly discovered one, are likely to orbit only once per orbit. This way, one side is always facing the star, as well The moon always has the same side facing to a land.

The “e” is in the optimistic habitable zone, which scientists have defined as the range of distances from a star where liquid water could have existed at some point in the planet’s history.