Astronomers using ESO’s leading exoplanet hunter HARPS
have today announced more than fifty newly discovered planets around other stars.
Among these are many rocky planets not much heavier than the Earth.
One of them in particular orbits within the habitable zone around its star.
This is the ESOcast!
Cutting-edge science and life behind the scenes of ESO,
the European Southern Observatory.
In this episode of the ESOcast,
we take a close look at another major exoplanet discovery
from ESO’s La Silla Observatory,
made thanks to its world-beating planet hunting machine HARPS.
Among the new planets just announced by scientists,
sixteen are super-Earths — rocky planets up to ten times as massive as Earth.
This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time.
A planet in orbit causes its star to regularly move backwards and forwards
as seen from Earth.
This creates a tiny shift of the star’s spectrum
that can be measured with an extremely sensitive spectrograph
such as HARPS.
In their quest to find a rocky planet that could harbour life,
astronomers are now pushing HARPS even further.
They have selected ten well-studied nearby stars similar to our Sun.
Earlier observations showed that these were ideal stars to examine
for even less massive planets.
After two years of work,
the team has found five light super-Earths around three of the stars.
These planets are very good candidates for future observations
looking for evidence of life.
One of the newly found planets, named HD 85512 b,
orbits inside the habitable zone.
This is the narrow area around a star where water can exist in liquid form.
Astronomers estimate that liquid water
could possibly be present on this planet
if it is a rocky world that has more than 50% cloud cover.
By looking carefully at the results from the first eight years of HARPS observations,
the team has found that around 40% of stars similar to the Sun
harbour at least one planet lighter than Saturn.
These new results lead astronomers to believe
that they could soon find more super-Earths
in the habitable zones of their stars with HARPS.
These planets will be great targets for powerful future telescopes
to try to study their atmospheres looking for evidence of life.
Thanks to HARPS, the search for another Earth elsewhere in the galaxy
is picking up pace!
ESOcast is produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory.
ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy,
designing, constructing and operating the world’s most advanced ground-based telescopes.
Transcription by ESO ; translation by —
Now that you've caught up with ESO,
head 'out of this world' with Hubble.
The Hubblecast highlights the latest discoveries of the world´s most recognized and prized space observatory,
the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope