The researchers believe that the discovery of Earth 2.0 (a planet very similar to ours) will be possible soon, it is only a matter of time. Dr. Franck Marchis (SETI Institute) has a date for this event. He believes that we will find a planet like ours up to 2024.
Marchis bases its prediction on the recent technological developments that have allowed researchers to photograph stars and planets distant up to 63 light years from Earth.
The project called the Gemini Planet Imager. They managed to photograph, a week ago, a planet aged 10 million years old called Beta Pictorus b, located at 435 trillion miles away. Gemini Planet Imager is the most advanced tool for searching planets, built in Chile.
“Even these first images are 10 times better than the previous generation equipment”, said Bruce Macintosh, the team leader who built the instrument.
“Unlike Kepler, which detect planets transition around a star, Gemini Planet Imager allows direct visualization of the planet”.
Recently, Scottish researchers announced that planets the size of Earth could sustain life at a distance of 10 times of their star.
“Imagine, one day we can see the effects of the seasons on those planets and we can see if there is a biosphere” said Professor Marchis.
Bottom line: The Gemini Planet Imager is the world’s most advanced planet hunting instrument built for the Gemini Telescope in Chile. It is designed to image extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars. In 2011, the GPI Exoplanet Survey team was selected to carry out an 890-hour survey campaign from 2014 to 2016 to search and characterise exoplanets around 600 stars. GPI, which is the size of a small car, detects infrared radiation from young Jupiter-like planets in wide orbits around other stars, equivalent to the giant planets in our own solar system not long after their formation.
Comments