Astronomers discover a “habitable planet” 31 light-years away
Experts have discovered a new planet called ‘Earth 2’, which according to them, might be home to aliens. The size of the distant star, named Wolf 1069 b, is roughly the same size as Earth and it likely has water in its territory.
Although there is not much information available, this outer world represents a promising candidate for future searches for life signatures on exoplanets close to Earth’s mass.
So far, more than 5,200 exoplanets have been confirmed, and less than 1.5% of them have masses less than two Earth planets.
Of these, dozens may orbit their stars at a distance that provides temperatures that allow liquid water to appear on the surface so that it is neither too hot to burn nor too cold to freeze.
It is noteworthy that the so-called habitable zone is the first step that scientists follow in narrowing down whether the outside world may or may not be hospitable to life, and this was adopted by a team of astronomers led by Diana Kosakovsky from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany, where they discovered the exoplanet Wolf 1069b, which has a mass 1.36 times that of Earth, orbits a nearby red dwarf star called Wolf 1069, in the constellation Cygnus.
Although Wolf 1069b is 15 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, the radiation it receives is regarding 65% of what Earth receives from the Sun.
