(CNN)- A new planet in the form of “Little Neptune” may have a cool temperate climate and liquid water – the potential for life.
Using data from NASA’s “exoplanet hunter” TESS and several ground-based telescopes, an aging team led by Dr. Akihiko Fukui from the University of Tokyo and the Canarias Institute of Astronomy has found a system The new star, TOI-2285, has a small gas planet with a cool climate. According to Dr. Fukui, the Kepler space mission has previously revealed that this type of planet is abundant in other star systems. Often referred to as “Little Neptune”, it is located between Earth and Neptune and is a gaseous planet.
According to Sci-News, Little Neptune has two forms, one is a group of hot and small planets located too close to the parent star, and a cooler and slightly larger form. The new planet belongs to the second type. Although it seems to be a bit outside the “habitable zone”, it is home to rocky planets like Earth, Mars or Venus and has a moderate distance from the parent star. But the existence of this boundary, combined with its own characteristics, suggests that this small Neptune may have water.
The new planet, called TOI-2285b, orbits its parent star every 27.3 days and receives 1.54 times more light from its parent star – a red dwarf – than Earth receives from the Sun. It has a radius of 1.74 times that of Earth but a mass 19.5 times less than that of Earth, because a gaseous planet usually has the thickest layer, a cloudy sky, so it is very light.
Astronomers believe that a layer of water exists under the planet’s hydrogen-rich atmosphere, and that its outermost rocky surface may also contain liquid water. In addition, is a climate similar to the temperate zone. There will be many more research steps before it can be determined whether the planet is really habitable and habitable, but considering what happens in the solar system, it is an optimistic possibility.
The study has just been published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.
