Astronomers have used a ground-based telescope for the first time to find a "super-Earth" exoplanet while it was transiting a nearby sun-like star. The findings should help scientists characterize a number of small planets that are expected to be discovered during future space missions, according to a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release.
The scientists used the 2.5-meter Nordic Optical Telescope on the island of La Palma in Spain to find the exoplanet called "55 Cancri e." The exoplanet's star, called "55 Cancri," is visible to the naked eye from Earth, as it is just 40 light-years away, the researchers said in a study, set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"Our observations show that we can detect the transits of small planets around Sun-like stars using ground-based telescopes," Ernst de Mooij of Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom and the study's lead author, said in a statement.
"55 Cancri e" crosses the star and blocks a fraction of its starlight during its transit, dimming the star by 0.05 percent for almost two hours. This helped scientists figure out that the planet is nearly twice the size of Earth, or 16,000 miles in diameter.
"This is especially important because upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO should find many small planets around bright stars and we will want to follow up the discoveries with ground-based instruments," de Mooij said.
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a telescope that is part of NASA's 2017 Explorer program.
The planet "55 Cancri e" is around eight times as large as Earth, and is the innermost of five different planets in the system. The planet is not suitable to support any known life form with daytime temperatures of over 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to melt metal.
"With this result we are also closing in on the detection of the atmospheres of small planets with ground-based telescopes," Mercedes Lopez-Morales of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the study's co-author, according to the release. "We are slowly paving the way toward the detection of bio-signatures in Earth-like planets around nearby stars."
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