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CosmosUp | September 22, 2023

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Nearby Super-Earth, Gliese 832 c, is the most Earth-like Exoplanet

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Nearby Super-Earth, Gliese 832 c, is the most Earth-like Exoplanet

On a clear night, you might be able to spot the red dwarf star Gliese 832 through a backyard telescope, as it is just 16 light years away. Today, astronomers announced the discovery of super-Earth planet orbiting this nearby star and say it might be the best candidate yet for habitable world.

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exoplanet in the star Gliese 832’s “habitable zone” — the just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist on a world’s surface. The planet, known as Gliese 832c, lies just 16 light-years from Earth. (For perspective, the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide; the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away.)

Gliese 832c is a “super-Earth” at least five times as massive as our planet, and it zips around its host star every 36 days. But that host star is a red dwarf that’s much dimmer and cooler than our sun, so Gliese 832c receives about as much stellar energy as Earth does, despite orbiting much closer to its parent, researchers said.

 ‘This makes Gliese 832 c one of the top three most Earth-like planets and the closest one to Earth of all three, a prime object for follow-up observations,’ said Abel Mendez Torres, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.

‘The planet might have Earth-like temperatures, albeit with large seasonal shifts, given a similar terrestrial atmosphere.’

However, other unknowns such as the bulk composition and atmosphere of the planet could make this world quite different to Earth and non-habitable, they warn.

A team led by Robert Wittenmyer, of the University of New South Wales in Australia, discovered Gliese 832c by noticing the tiny wobbles the planet’s gravity induces in the motion of its host star.

They spotted these wobbles in data gathered by three separate instruments — the University College London Echelle Spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia, the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph on the Magellan II telescope in Chile and the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, which is part of the European Southern Observatory’s 11.8-foot (3.6 meters) telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Gliese 832c is the second planet to be discovered around the star Gliese 832. The other one, Gliese 832b, was found in 2009; it’s a gas giant that circles much farther out, taking about nine years to complete one orbit.

 The number of planets in the catalog has almost doubled this year alone:

 However, it’s unclear at the moment just how much Gliese 832c resembles Earth. Indeed, its discoverers think the newfound world may be more similar to scorching-hot Venus, with a thick atmosphere that has led to a runaway greenhouse effect.

Source: https://goo.gl/cyHp0i



Comments


  1. Sharlyn

    I want to know what happen the worlds


    • James Brewer

      The evil thing called power & greed


  2. Ian T

    So is there NO follow-up that is being planned that you could have included in this article?! Is there any other investigation that can be done to narrow down the possible planet type?


    • Andrew

      Well I suppose the authors didn’t want to complicate the story with too much information. The answer is that just detecting the planet is on the limit of what science can do right now. The next step is to try to detect something like light that has passed through the Atmosphere of the planet which can give a clue to what the atmosphere is made of. That is if it has an atmosphere. For scale, this is like detecting a marble in Los Angles while being in New York!


  3. r.s arellabo

    i want to go there!


  4. Nasa

    4.2 light years?travel at speed of light for 4.2 years, no problem


  5. Doug Sinden

    How long would it take to get there. My bags are packed


  6. Louise

    Don’t you think we would all be absolutely ignorant to think we were the only planet and species to exist, of course there is other life out there. But don’t be stupid enough to think you can go there. Unless you have millions to waste on time and useless dreams. Where you are is where you will stay.


  7. Mac

    They find these planets, liken them to earth then tell us I it’s bigger atmosphere is different orbit is different. When chill they stop living in a dreamland and face reality. We have about as much chance at leaving this planet as a cement balloon has at getting off the ground


  8. Moses prince

    I need a highlight of the light years…are they real years like we count them here on earth or something


    • John Chew Yeok Peng

      A light-year is the distance between Earth since we are the observer, equivalent to the distance light can travel in the time of 1 year. It is a unit of distance in astronomical science, as most astro objects ie stars we observe using a telescope are astronomically far away as compared to the scale of our Solar system. In measuring distance in our solar system, a common method is the astrononical unit AU, which is the distance between the Earth and our Sun. Anything that is out of the solar system in Milky Way galaxy,or other galaxies, is so far away that even light need years to travel and reach.


    • Larry

      No, it’s the distance that you can travel in a year at the speed of light.


  9. David Mwinsung Yelifari

    How long can a journey from earth take to reach there


    • Bill

      At present technology many lifetimes l


  10. Manas

    Interesting and Curious.

    On a lighter note, this Article is dated back to June 2014 but comments start coming in 2020..How many light years it took for the article to get notice.


    • Niyi Taiwo

      … or how many dark years it took that the article was not noticed!


  11. Kerry Trester II

    ())===D~`~~ (@ )( @)

    Just because


  12. Shrikant Purandare

    Have any traces of water been found on it?


  13. Well I’m going there

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