An earth-sized planet found in an area inhabited by a nearby star

Until about a decade ago, astronomers knew only two habitable zonal planets: Earth and Mars.
A few months ago, a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers searching for planets around other stars invited me to a secret meeting to tell me about a planet that had piqued their interest.

Because my expertise is based on modeling the climate of exoplanets, they asked me to find out if this new planet is habitable – a place where there may be liquid water.

These NASA colleagues, Josh Schlieder and his students Emily Gilbert, Tom Barclay, and Elisa Quintana, had researched TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data when they discovered TESS in the area of ​​the first known planet the size of Earth with liquid water. could be on the surface of an earthly planet. This is very exciting news because this new planet is relatively close to Earth, and its atmosphere may be observable with either the James Webb Space Telescope or the large telescope on Earth.

Planets of the habitable area
The host star of the planet found by Gilbert’s team is called TESS of Interest number 700 or TOI-700. Compared to the sun, it is a small, dim star. It is 40% in size, only about 1/50 of the brightness of the Sun, and is located about 100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Dorado, visible from our southern hemisphere. By comparison: the closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years from Earth. Understanding these distances would take nearly 20,000 years if you traveled on the fastest spacecraft (Parker Solar Probe) to get to the Proxima Centauri.

There are three planets around the TOI-700: b, c, and d. Planet d is Earth-sized, in a star-inhabited zone, and orbits the TOI-700 every 37 days. My colleagues wanted me to create a creative climate model for planet d using the known properties of the star and the planet. Planets b and c are the size of Earth and the size of mini-Neptune. However, they orbit much closer to their host star, receiving 5 times and 2.6 times as much starlight as our own country receives from the Sun. By comparison: Venus, a dry and hell-hot world with a surface temperature of about 860 degrees Fahrenheit, receives twice as much sunlight as Earth.

Until about a decade ago, astronomers knew only two habitable zonal planets: Earth and Mars. Over the past decade, however, astronomers have discovered about a dozen terrestrial-sized exoplanets, thanks to discoveries made by both terrestrial telescopes and the Kepler mission (which also searched for exoplanets in 2009–2019 but is now retired). These are half to twice the size of the globe in the habitable areas of their host star.

Despite the relatively large number of discoveries of small exoplanets to date, most of the stars are 600 to 3,000 light-years from Earth – too far away and dim for detailed observation.

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