This world, Ross 508 b, has a year of only 11 Earth-days and lies at the inner edge of the habitable zone around its host star. Remarkably, there are signs that the orbit is elliptical, which would imply that for part of the orbit the planet would be in the habitable zone, the area where conditions would be right for liquid water to exist on the surface of the world.
To have the really first world found by this new method be so tantalizingly near to the habitable zone appears too excellent to be true and bodes well for future discoveries. Bun ei Sato, a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the primary detective in this search comments, “It has actually been 14 years considering that the start of IRDs development. We have actually continued our development and research with the hope of finding a planet exactly like Ross 508 b.”
Recommendation: “A super-Earth orbiting near the inner edge of the habitable zone around the M4.5 dwarf Ross 508” by Hiroki Harakawa, Takuya Takarada, Yui Kasagi, Teruyuki Hirano, Takayuki Kotani, Masayuki Kuzuhara, Masashi Omiya, Hajime Kawahara, Akihiko Fukui, Yasunori Hori, Hiroyuki Tako Ishikawa, Masahiro Ogihara, John Livingston, Timothy D Brandt, Thayne Currie, Wako Aoki, Charles A Beichman, Thomas Henning, Klaus Hodapp, Masato Ishizuka, Hideyuki Izumiura, Shane Jacobson, Markus Janson, Eiji Kambe, Takanori Kodama, Eiichiro Kokubo, Mihoko Konishi, Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy, Tomoyuki Kudo, Takashi Kurokawa, Nobuhiko Kusakabe, Jungmi Kwon, Yuji Matsumoto, Michael W McElwain, Koyu Mitsui, Takao Nakagawa, Norio Narita, Jun Nishikawa, Stevanus K Nugroho, Eugene Serabyn, Takuma Serizawa, Aoi Takahashi, Akitoshi Ueda, Taichi Uyama, Sébastien Vievard, Ji Wang, John Wisniewski, Motohide Tamura and Bun ei Sato, 30 June 2022, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.DOI: 10.1093/ pasj/psac044.
The green area represents the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the planetary surface area. The planetary orbit is shown as a blue line. Ross 508 b skims the inner edge of the habitable zone (solid line), potentially crossing into the habitable zone for part of the orbit (rushed line). Credit: Astrobiology
A new super-Earth planet was found 37 light years from Earth.
Just 37 light-years from Earth, a super-Earth world has been found near a red dwarf stars habitable zone. This is the first finding made by a brand-new instrument on the Subaru Telescope, and it provides a chance to look into the possibility of life existing on worlds around neighboring stars. With such a promising preliminary finding, we can hope the Subaru Telescope finds more, possibly even much better, prospects for habitable planets near red dwarfs in the future.
Three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy are red overshadows, which are smaller than the Sun and abundant in the solar neighborhood. They are therefore crucial targets in the hunt for nearby extrasolar worlds and extraterrestrial life. Red overshadows are cooler than other kinds of stars and produce less visible light, which makes it challenging to study them.
Red dwarfs are more visible at infrared wavelengths. In order to search for evidence of planets surrounding red dwarf stars, the Astrobiology Center in Japan produced an infrared observational instrument installed atop the Subaru Telescope. The instrument is called IRD for Infrared Doppler, the observational technique utilized in this search.
Ross 508 b skims the inner edge of the habitable zone (solid line), potentially crossing into the habitable zone for part of the orbit (rushed line). Just 37 light-years from Earth, a super-Earth world has actually been found close to a red dwarf stars habitable zone. Interestingly, there are signs that the orbit is elliptical, which would mean that for part of the orbit the planet would be in the habitable zone, the area where conditions would be ideal for liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. To have the extremely first planet discovered by this brand-new technique be so tantalizingly close to the habitable zone appears too excellent to be true and bodes well for future discoveries.