We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life.
Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be conducive to life's emergence.
The search for exoplanets – that is, extrasolar planets, those outside our Solar System – is hobbled by the. Make no mistake, that technology is amazing; but our primary methods for finding exoplanets are way better at finding large worlds than small ones. So, while more than 5,200 exoplanets have been confirmed at time of writing, fewer than 1.5 percent of those have masses below that of two Earths.
A location in this so-called habitable zone is the first step in narrowing down whether a world may or may not be hospitable to life. And this is what a team of astronomers led by Diana Kossakowski of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany have discovered a nearby red dwarf star Wolf 1069."When we analyzed the data of the star Wolf 1069, we discovered a clear, low-amplitude signal of what appears to be a planet of roughly Earth mass,""It orbits the star within 15.
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