‘second Earth’ discovered 100 light years away (video)

Another exoplanet that looks like ours, a “second Earth”, scientists with the TESS space telescope of the American Space Agency (NASA) have discovered.

This is TOI 700e, which is about 100 light years away and is 95% the size of Earth, that is, it is marginally smaller, and it is probably also rocky.

Most interestingly, this “second Earth” appears to be orbiting its star (a small, relatively cool M-type red dwarf) at a distance suitable for the existence of liquid water and the development of life.

The other Earth-like planets

Astronomers had previously discovered three planets in the same system, TOI b, c and d. The latter also moves in the habitable zone and resembles Earth.

The researchers, led by astronomer Emily Gilbert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, made the announcement at a conference of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, and a publication in the astrophysics journal “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” will follow.

“This is one of the few systems with many small and potentially habitable planets that we know of. This makes the TOI 700 system eminently suitable for further study. Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so it turns out that additional observations with TESS allow us to find smaller and smaller worlds,” said Gilbert.

The star TOI 700 is located in the southern constellation of Dorado, and in 2020 the Earth-like (and 20% larger than it) exoplanet d was discovered around it. The innermost planet b, which is 90% the size of Earth, has a year of ten days (the time of one complete revolution around its parent star), c is 2.5 times larger than Earth and has a year 16 days, d has a year of 37 days, while e has 28 days.

TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) was launched in April 2018 and is now NASA’s main exoplanet hunter, having discovered 285 confirmed exoplanets and more than 6,000 candidates to date. TOI stands for “TESS Object of Interest”.

Observation of the TOI 700 system with TESS, as well as other ground-based and space-based telescopes, continues. The TOI 700 system is the second one of so much interest to astronomers after the nearest Trappist-1 system at a distance of 39.5 light-years from Earth, which has seven planets that have similarities to our own.

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