(www.neomundo.com.ar/ SINC) dank u een dan de Europese waarnemingspost Austral (ESO) in Chili telescopen, is waargenomen door een team van astronomen van de Universiteit van Genève (Zwitserland) leidde een iets groter dan de terrestrial planet een baan om een ster vergelijkbaar met onze Sun. massa

te dicht

de planeet is veel dichter bij de ster Alpha Centauri B, dan de aarde, en zelfs kwik, ons. “kwik is gelegen op 0,3 astronomische eenheden (AU) from the Sun, terwijl de nieuwe exoplaneet alleen is 0.04 au van de ster, dat wil zeggen een 7,5 keer dichter”, legt SINC Xavier Dumusque, belangrijkste auteur van het werk.

deze nabijheid zet de exoplaneet buiten de bewoonbare zone, de afstand van de ster waar water – indien aanwezig – misschien wel vloeibaar, for what cannot be considered him a twin of the Earth. “the planet orbits its star in 3.2 days and they require 200 days, so it is far from habitable zone”, recognizes Dumusque.

the researcher stresses that this study, published today by Nature, “shows that if we want to detect planets similar to Earth in habitable zones, we should extremely accurately characterize the different signals that induce the stars, as we have begun to do this analysis that has led us to the discovery of the planet’.

As was LO ENCONTRO

the Exoplanet was detected using the HARPS, instrument installed on the 3.6 m telescope at La Silla Observatory that, in Chile. equipment detected it capturing the small wobble in the motion of the star Alpha Centauri B generated by the pull of gravity on the planet than the orbits.

the effect is tiny, it causes the star to move towards front and towards back no more than 51 centimeters per second – 1.8 km/hour, more or less the speed that a baby reaches when it crawls-. is the highest precision never achieved with this technique.

Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest of the Southern skies stars and star system closest to our solar system – is only 4.3 years distance light –. is actually a triple star system, which consists of two stars similar to the Sun orbiting near each other, designated as Alpha Centauri A and B, and a more distant weak red star known as next Centauri.

since the 19th century, astronomers speculated with the possibility of the existence of planets orbiting these bodies, since it would be the closest that place find a host that could host life beyond the solar system, but up to now great precision searches had not revealed nothing.

Alpha Centauri B is very similar to the Sun, but slightly smaller and less bright. the new planet discovered orbiting some six million kilometers from its star. the orbit of the other bright of this double, Star Alpha Centauri A component is, stays up to hundreds of times that distance, but even so it would be a very bright object in the skies of this planet.

The eternal search of our twin

the first Exoplanet around a star type Sun was found by the same team in 1995 and, since then, there have been more than 800 confirmed discoveries, but most of them are planets much larger that ours, abounding planets Jupiter type. The challenge is to detect and characterize one of mass similar to earth but in the habitable zone of its star.

“this is the first planet with a mass similar to that of Earth found around a star of Sun orbits very close to its star and must do too hot to host life as we know it”, insists Stéphane Udry, co-author of the article and a member also of the Geneva Observatory, “but it is possible that it is part of a system where there are more planets. other results of HARPS and new discoveries of Kepler, clearly show that most of the low-mass planets are in such systems”.

“Searches based on radial velocity as ours are involved in the overall effort is being done by detect exoplanets of low mass, in addition to space as a Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions,” adds Dumusque.

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