Project SPECULOOS: Astronomers have discovered a new planet the size of Earth. According to the report published in Nature Astronomy, day and night are endless on this planet.
SPECULOOS-3 b Planet: Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-sized planet 55 light years away. This planet is revolving around a very cool red dwarf star. Information about this new discovery has been published in Nature Astronomy. An international team of astronomers says that this is the second planet of its kind to be discovered around this type of star.
Lifespan of stars is approximately 100 billion years.
According to the report, this star known as SPECULOOS-3 b takes about 17 hours to complete one orbit. This means that one year on the planet is shorter than one day on Earth. It is more than twice as cold as our Sun. Astronomers say that this planet is ten times less massive and a hundred times less bright. The report also says that days and nights are endless on SPECULOOS-3 b.
Phys.org quoted Michel Gillon, the lead author of the discovery and an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, as saying, "We believe that the planet rotates synchronously. That's why that time is called the time of day." It always faces the star, as the Moon does for the Earth, and there will be complete darkness at night.
About 70 percent of all the stars in our galaxy are extremely cool red dwarf stars. Their lifespan is about 100 billion years. This also becomes important for astronomers because they have to wait for several weeks to identify the planets passing in front.
Discovery of planet with the help of SPECULOOS project
The SPECULOOS project helped a lot in discovering this planet. The project is led by the University of Liège in Belgium in collaboration with the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Bern and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SPECULOOS, or Search for Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars, searches for potentially habitable exoplanets around the smallest and coolest stars in the Solar System with the help of robotic telescopes located around the world.
"We designed Speculoos specifically to observe nearby ultracool dwarf stars in search of rocky planets that are suitable for detailed study," said astronomer Michael Gillon. He further said that in 2017, using the TRAPPIST telescope, our SPECULOS prototype discovered the famous TRAPPIST-1 system made up of seven Earth-sized planets. Many of these were potentially habitable.
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