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An international research team led by the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced the discovery of a “super-Earth,” offering fresh clues in the search for carbon-based life beyond our planet.
The exoplanet, called Kepler-725c by the team, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and is located in the habitable zone outside Kepler-725, a Sun-like, G-type main sequence star.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on June 3, “represents a critical step for China’s scientific community in the quest to find a second Earth,” Wang Xiaobin, a member of the research team, told domestic media on June 4.
Kepler-725c completes an orbit of the star — which is younger and has significantly stronger magnetic activity than our own — every 207.5 days and exists within what is considered a habitable zone, where liquid water, a fundamental condition for life, could potentially exist.
Super-Earths — planets that are larger than Earth but not necessarily featuring the same atmospheric conditions — are among the most common types of planets found in the galaxy.
According to Wang, Kepler-725c, which is 1.6 billion years old versus our 4.5-billion-year-old planet, had remained undetected in the data accrued by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler Space Telescope.
Scientists traditionally rely on two methods to detect planets: the transit approach, measuring how much a planet’s host star dims as a planet passes in front of it from our vantage point, and the radial velocity method, which detects small wobbles in a star’s motion caused by gravitational interactions with its orbiting planets. However, both techniques struggle with identifying low-mass planets with long orbital periods in Sun-like systems, such as those similar to Earth’s, because these are smaller and transit their stars less frequently.
Instead, the researchers used transit-timing variation (TTV) inversion technology to prove the existence of Kepler-725c, as well as its mass and orbit, measuring subtle deviations in its transit time caused by the gravitational influence of other planets in its solar system.
“It’s like observing how fast a clock runs to determine whether someone has quietly moved the hands,” Sun Leilei, the author of the paper, said about TTV.
Wang noted that TTV inversion is particularly effective in this domain, overcoming the limitations of traditional planet detection methods.
“(TTV) doesn’t require observing the planet as it transits in front of its host star, nor does it rely on detecting the star’s slight wobble along our line of sight,” Wang added. “Instead, it measures the transit timing of another planet in orbital resonance with the target, allowing scientists to infer the presence of the unseen planet.”
Most low-mass exoplanets — planets that exist outside of our solar system — so far found in habitable zones have been discovered around red dwarf stars, making this discovery within a solar-type system especially significant.
Planets that orbit red dwarf stars are traditionally easier to identify because their transit signals are relatively stronger, blocking a larger fraction of the star’s light. Their gravitational wobbles caused by orbiting planets are also more noticeable, enhancing radial velocity signals.
Dreams of populating the planet remain a distant prospect, however. “It is about 160 million times farther away from us than the distance between the Earth and the Sun,” Gu Shenghong, a researcher at the observatory, told state-run broadcaster CCTV.
Nevertheless, reviewers of the findings as well as Nature Astronomy’s editors highlighted the importance of the breakthrough and especially its use of TTV, which provides a crucial new means to identify potentially habitable exoplanets in the universe.
Editor: Tom Arnstein.
(Header image: From Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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