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An international research team has discovered a “super-Earth” with a special property: the exoplanet HD 20794 d, which is almost twenty light years away from Earth, could provide new insights into the habitability of other celestial bodies.
According to the University of Geneva, the celestial body tests new hypotheses about extraterrestrial life. As the experts announced on Tuesday, the planet with the name HD 20794 d oscillates between the habitable and non-habitable zones on its elliptical orbit around its sun.
The habitable zone is the area around a star where liquid water could theoretically exist. According to the university, this configuration is particularly interesting for astronomers to test hypotheses about a planet’s habitability. Evidence of the discovery was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
19.7 light-years away
HD 20794 d is a so-called super-Earth, a rocky planet larger than Earth. It is part of a solar system 19.7 light years away from us and contains two other planets. Astronomers consider this distance to be close. According to the University of Geneva, this proximity makes it easier to study the planet.
According to the University of Geneva, the discovery of an exoplanet was made possible by data collected with various telescopes over the past 20 years. Exoplanets are planets that exist outside our solar system and orbit other stars. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019. Astronomers have discovered more than 7,000 exoplanets.
- source: science.ORF.at/Agencies/picture: Image by fernando zhiminaicela from Pixabay
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