The green region represents the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the planetary surface. The planetary orbit is shown as a blue line. Ross 508 b skims the inner edge of the habitable zone (solid line), possibly crossing into the habitable zone for part of the orbit (dashed line). Credit: Astrobiology Center
A new super-Earth planet was found 37 light years from Earth.
Only 37 light-years from Earth, a super-Earth planet has been discovered close to a red dwarf star’s habitable zone. This is the first finding made by a brand-new instrument on the Subaru Telescope, and it presents an opportunity to look into the possibility of life existing on planets around nearby stars. With such a promising initial finding, we can hope the Subaru Telescope finds more, perhaps even better, candidates for habitable planets near red dwarfs in the future.
Three-quarters of the stars in the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the principal investigator in this search comments, “It has been 14 years since the start of IRD’s development. We have continued our development and research with the hope of finding a planet exactly like Ross 508 b.”
Reference: “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
