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Eleven light-years from Earth, orbiting a dark red star, there is an exoplanet called Ross 128b which, as we have recently reported, has some better life prospects of any distant world known. New findings can help astronomers understand what the planet is made of – and they bring more evidence that it could be in the habitable zone of the star mother.
The international team of researchers analyzed the data of the high-resolution infrared measuring instrument. a telescope in New Mexico. They calculated the temperature of the star and its abundance of eight different elements. The star study has helped researchers make inferences on the planet, such that it seems to orbit at a distance that is not too close or too far away, placing it in the so-called habitable area. But what can we really say about the planet itself?
"Dwarves closely related M probably offer the best opportunities to detect and characterize potentially" telluric "exoplanets in the near future," write the authors in their new article published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . "An approach to study the composition of the exoplanet, although indirect, is the analysis of the individual host star."
You might remember using a spectrometer in high school chemistry to determine which elements, when they are excited, produce what colors of light. That's how much astronomy works, and pretty much how APOGEE works, an instrument on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope, although it uses infrared rather than visible light. Scientists looked at the APOGEE data on Ross 128 and calculated how much carbon, oxygen, magnesium, aluminum, potassium, calcium, titanium and iron had the ## EQU1 ## 39; star. The abundance of these elements in the star can help determine the temperature of the exoplanet and indicate which elements were initially available in the dust ring around the star at the moment of the formation of the planet.
The planet probably has a larger nucleus than the Earth, and a pleasant average temperature around 69.5 degrees Fahrenheit (294 Kelvin), based on these results.
A researcher not involved in the new study had some reservations. "As far as I know, they measured elemental star abundances (that's novelty) and then a lot of modeling and extrapolation," Guillem Anglada Escude, astronomer at Gizmodo, told Gizmodo. Queen Mary University of London. "I would not call it a breakthrough, and inferring the properties of the planet in this way takes a big leap of faith." He explained that there are still tons of unknowns, like how the elemental abundances of the planet correspond to those of the planet. planet formed in the early dust disk.
Emily Rice, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CUNY College in Staten Island, who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo that he is always useful to understand the composition of the star, "especially when it speaks"
The new results on the potentially habitable exoplanets are always attractive, but there is only a lot of information that we can gather about them with Current technology: Really determining whether these exoplanets are actually earth-like will take better technology, such as the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope or another future flagship telescope, such as LUVOIR or HabEx.
[ApJ Letters]
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