The Tess de la NASA satellite, in charge of the search for planets beyond the Solar System, has found about one hundred million light-years, one of similar size to the Earth and that is in the area of its star’s habitability, which It is not usually normal in exoplanets known so far.
Baptized as TOI 700 d, it is “one of the few planets the size of the Earth discovered so far in the habitable zone of a star.” Among those that are known, there are three of the planetary system TRAPPIST-1.
Tess was designed and launched, in April 2018, specifically to find planets the size of the Earth that orbit around nearby stars, “NASA’s director of astrophysics division Paul Hertz said in a statement.
This is the first time that Tess has discovered an exoplanet of these characteristics, which is why Hertz considered it “a key scientific finding” for this mission.
The TOI 700 star, to which three exoplanets orbit, is a cold dwarf with 40% of the mass and size of the Sun, located about 100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Dorado.
Of those three planets, TOI 700 d is the outermost of the system and the only one in the habitable zone of the star, that is, it is located in a range of distance from its sun that allows the existence of liquid water on the surface.
In addition, it is 20% larger than Earth and orbits its star every 37 days, from which it receives 86% of the energy that the Sun provides to our planet, according to the data presented by researchers during the meeting it celebrates until Wednesday in Honolulu (USA) the American Astronomical Society.
Although the exact conditions in this exoplanet are unknown, scientists can use current information about the size and type of star it orbits to generate computer models and make predictions.
So far, they have made twenty models of potential environments to determine if any of them would result in temperatures and surface pressures suitable for habitability.
