There’s been an important scientific discovery made just recently, and the experts are in awe. It’s been just reported that astronomers from the CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs) consortium have found a short-period rocky planet orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 486.
Sci-News.com reports that “Gliese 486 is an M-dwarf star located 26.3 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. Also known as GJ 486, Wolf 437, LHS 341, and HIC 62452, the star is much fainter and cooler than the Sun.”
More than that, it’s been revealed that the newfound planet is orbiting the star once every 1.5 days, and this is happening at a distance of 2.5 million km.
Meet Gliese 486b
“Designated Gliese 486b, it belongs to a class of exoplanets called super-Earths. It has a radius of 1.31 Earth radii, a mass 2.8 times that of our home planet, but has a similar density,” according to the notes coming from the same online publication mentioned above.
It’s been also reported that the composition is not its only distinguishing feature, but more than that, the relative closeness to Earth makes this an ideal candidate for observations with the next-gen of astronomical technology.
“The proximity of this exoplanet is exciting because it will be possible to study it in more detail with powerful telescopes such as the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and the various Extremely Large Telescopes such as the GMT and TMT,” said Dr Trifon Trifonov, an astronomer at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie as cited by the online publication mentioned above.
He continued and said that “Within the next few years, we hope to use transit spectroscopy to search for signs of an atmosphere and possibly determine this planet’s surface composition.”
In order to find out more available details on the planet, we suggest that you head over to the original article.
