Scientists have discovered a ‘super-Earth’ awash with oceans on one side and baked on the other after it flashed a repeated signal.
The exoplanet, TOI-1846 b, is almost two times larger and four times heavier than Earth, and a year is only four Earth days.
TOI-1846 b is 154 light years away – to put that into perspective, it would take a car driving at 60mph about 2billion years to get there.
The alien world orbits a dim, reddish ball of gas called a red dwarf star in the northern constellation Lyra.
Scientists discovered it after tracing back a flickering light recorded by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in March.
By pointing both space and ground-based telescopes up at the signal, researchers realised it was a planet blotting out a few hundredths of a percent of the light of its star as it orbited past.
The team wrote in a recently published paper TOI-1846 b falls into the so-called ‘radius gap’ – not quite a rocky planet, not quite a gas giant.
TOI-1846 b probably has a layer of dense ice underneath and is awash in oceans of water, topped by a thin atmosphere. It would be about 295°C on the planet’s surface, as only one side of it is ever facing its sun.
Abderahmane Soubkiou, lead researcher at Oukaimeden Observatory in Morocco, said: ‘We have validated TOI-1846 b using TESS and multicolour ground-based photometric data, high-resolution imaging, and spectroscopic observations.’
But while that sounds like a lot, more tests and observations are needed to figure out the planet’s atmosphere and composition.
There’s only a slim chance that life could be wriggling around the planet’s oceans given the blistering temperatures.
But its host star, TOI-1846, makes the chances of this not too bad elsewhere.
Compared to our Sun, the 7.2billion years old TOI-1846 is tiny – just 0.4 times the size of our neighbourhood star and is only TOI-1846.
Red dwarfs are the most common type of star and, as they’re cooler, their habitable zones are far closer to them. This means planetary systems that fall in these zones are far easier to spot.
For now, scientists will keep looking at the star to see if any other planets are drifting around it – ones further out could more safely have water.
To determine if aliens are calling any planets around TOI-1846 home, for example, scientists will now need to conduct radial velocity (RV) observations, looking at how the planet and its star wobble.
This method, called transit timing, has been used to confirm more than 630 exoplanets so far across 7,600 transit events witnessed by TESS.
Astronomers had long suspected that other planets like the ones whizzing around our Sun exist, but struggled to spot them.
Now they have confirmed nearly 5,300, according to the Open Exoplanet Catalog.
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