奇速英语

新发现的“超级地球”类行星或支持生命存在

An international team of scientists says it has discovered two new “super-Earth” type planets about 100 light-years away, one of which may be suitable for life.

Unlike any of the planets in our solar system, the nearly 1,600 known super-Earths are larger than Earth, but lighter than icy planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Researchers at Belgium’s University of Liège announced Wednesday that they found another one while using Earth-based telescopes to confirm the existence of a different planet initially discovered by a NASA satellite in the same solar system.

NASA’s satellite found planet LP 890-9b, which is about 30% larger than Earth and orbits its sun in just 2.7 days. ULiège researchers used their SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes in Chile and Spain to take a closer look at the planet with high-precision(高精度) cameras. That’s when the stargazers(天文学家) discovered another planet, LP 890-9c (renamed SPECULOOS-2c by the ULiège researchers), which is 40% larger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit its sun.

Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and one of the main co-authors of the paper, said that the planet could be suitable to life despite being a mere 3.7 million miles from its sun. Earth, by comparison, is located over 93 million miles away from our sun. “Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation(照射) it receives is still low, and could allow the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface, if it has a sufficient atmosphere,” Pozuelos said. “This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star.”