A scientific team from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in Spain, announced this week the discovery of two “potentially” habitable planets.
“Nature seems determined to show us that terrestrial planets are very common. With these two, we already know 7 in planetary systems very close to the Sun”explained Alejandro Suárez, IAC researcher and lead author of the study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, in a statement.
the new planets They orbit around the star GJ 1002, located at a distance of less than 16 light years from the Solar System.
Both have masses similar to that of the Earth. and they are in the habitable zone of their star and the IAC points out that GJ 1002 b, the inner planet, takes just over 10 days to complete an orbit around its star while GJ 1002 c, for its part, needs little more of 21 days.
GJ 1002 is a red dwarf with just one eighth of the mass of the Sun and it is a rather cold and weak star, which means that its habitable zone is very close to the star, indicated Vera María Passegger, co-author of the article and researcher of the IAC.
the findings
The star’s closeness to the Solar System makes the two planets, especially GJ 1002 c, excellent candidates for characterizing their atmospheres on the basis of light reflection or thermal emission, the astrophysics institute added.
“The future ANDES spectrograph for the ESO ELT telescope, in which the IAC participates, will be able to study the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere of GJ 1002 c”, explained Jonay González, IAC researcher and co-author of the work.
Both planets also meet all the characteristics to become targets of the future LIFE space mission, currently under study.
The discovery has been possible thanks to a collaboration between the ESPRESSO and CARMENES consortia and the IAC notes that GJ 1002 was observed by CARMENES between 2017 and 2019, and by ESPRESSO between 2019 and 2021.
“Due to its low temperature, the visible light of GJ 1002 is too dim to measure its variations in radial velocity with most spectrographs,” said Ignasi Ribas, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and director of the Institute. d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC).
CARMENES has a sensitivity to a wide range of wavelengths in the near infrared, superior to that of other spectrographs dedicated to detecting speed variations in the movement of stars, which allowed it to study GJ 1002 from the 3.5-meter telescope at Calar Tall.
The combination of ESPRESSO and the light-gathering power of the 8-meter-diameter VLT telescopes made it possible to obtain measurements with a precision of just 30 cm/s, unattainable by almost any other instrument in the world.
“Either of the two groups would have had a lot of difficulties if they had tackled this work independently. Together we were able to go much further than we would have done separately,” said Alejandro Suárez. Researchers Rafael Rebolo López, Víctor Sánchez Béjar and Enric Pallé have also collaborated on this publication from the IAC.
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The stellar astrophysics and exoplanets group of the Complutense University of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and the Institute of Particle Physics and the Cosmos of the Complutense University of Madrid (IPARCOS-UCM), whose researcher David Montes is also involved in the discovery. the institutional representative of the center in the CARMENES international consortium.
David Montes has also been the principal investigator of several projects coordinated by the Ministry of Science and Innovation dedicated to the construction of the instrument, the preparation and currently another dedicated to its scientific exploitation. In addition, he is also a member of the scientific coordination team that regulates the scientific exploitation of the CARMENES data results.
CARMENES is a new generation instrument built for the 3.5-meter telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory by a consortium of German and Spanish institutions.
It consists of two spectrographs and its scientific objective is to carry out a survey of approximately 300 late-type main sequence stars in order to detect low-mass planets in their habitable zones. For its part, ESPRESSO is a very high-resolution spectrograph installed in the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.