Astronomers have found an atmosphere around the super Earth-like planet GJ 1132b. The team of scientists led by Dr. John Southworth of Keele University in the U.K.used a special telescope to observe the planet and a nearby star. Once the planet passed by the star, Southworth and his team took a closer look at the images and determined that the planet had absorbed some of the starlight from the passing star, which points to an atmosphere. The discovery could prove that there is life on another planet.
“While this is not the detection of life on another planet, it’s an important step in the right direction: the detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth GJ 1132b marks the first time that an atmosphere has been detected around an Earth-like planet other than Earth itself,” Southworth explained, in a statement
Before this research found this information, the only examples of any sort of Earth like atmosphere came from “gas giant” planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The newly discovered planet is thought to be about 39-light years away from Earth. Each light year is 6 trillion miles, so simple math tells you that this newly discovered planet is roughly 234 trillion light years away from us here on Earth.
For instance, the widely known “super Earth” planet Proxima b, that orbits the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is about 4-light-years from Earth. So, that’s about 24 trillion light years away. Still considerably far away, but seemingly much closer than GJ 1132b is to Earth.
In addition to Southworth and his team, experts from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cambridge, the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Stockholm University had teams that participated in the research and contributed information toward these discoveries.
Earlier this year an international team of astronomers found 60 new planets orbiting stars close to Earth’s solar system, including a rocky “super Earth.” The experts also found evidence of more than 50 more planets, bringing the potential discovery of new worlds to over 110 in total. That’s a lot new planets, and a lot of new chance to discover life on other planets too.
Full article at Fox News
