Exceptional Earth Sized Planet in the Habitable Zone Found 40 Light Years Away

so a few hours ago from when I'm making this video NASA officially announced a confirmation of yet another Super exciting exoplanet that seems to be both terrestrial but also potentially habitable because of its orbit but even more importantly it's relatively close to us and can also be observed by a lot of telescopes including the James web and so how wonderful person this is Anton let's discuss the discovery of glea 12b focusing on why this is actually kind of important but also focusing on what this planet might be like and what the surface of this planet could maybe look like now obviously a lot of these questions don't actually have answers yet but because of the way this planet orbits around the star we're going to have a lot of these answers really soon but to begin okay so let's talk about the star as in many other star systems this is the most common star in the galaxy this is an M type star or a red dwarf it's about 27% the size of the sun and has a surface temperature of about 60% of the Sun so in essence not too hot and not too big but in all of the previous cases red dwarfs had one major problem very often they were exceptionally active producing a lot of emissions and a lot of flares and because they're generally much more magnetically active than the sun they would result in frequent very very powerful x-ray flares like remember those flares not so long ago that the planet Earth survived so yeah that times 100 or even a thousand and unfortunately this was one of the biggest disappointments with the nearby Proxima B the closest star system to us that's about 4.2 light years away that potentially contains two planets and one of them is terrestrial in the habitable zone but Proxima B is Super Active and produces a lot of really powerful flares one of them possibly even fooled us into thinking it was alien communication and these flares are powerful enough to almost completely strip the atmosphere from these planets in just a few million years now the most exciting star system discovered so far trapist one is also redw Warf but so far seems to be not as active and so there are some chances that maybe some of those planets might have something on them but what about this new discovered system GZA 12 turns out and this is a direct quote from the scientists it seems to have one of the lowest Stellar activity levels known for m dwarf stars or just to rephrase this it actually seems to be one of the least active red dwars we've ever seen basically implying that this particular planet does actually have a chance to maybe retain some atmosphere now we know that in the trapist one system the nearest two planets trapist 1B and trapist 1 C appear to be Barren and that's probably because they're just so close to the star but what about this planet how does the orbit compare here well here the analysis suggests that it still seems to receive a little bit more radiation than planet Earth actually approximately 1.6 times more but a little bit less than Venus maybe about 85% of what the Venus receives which basically implies that its equilibrium temperature is a little bit hotter than Earth but cooler than Venus and so here everything depends on whether it has the atmosphere and so here on Earth the equilibrium temperature or basically the temperature without greenhouse effect is approximately 279 Kelvin but the actual temperature is a little bit higher at 287 Kelvin but if you compare this to Venus it's way more extreme 328 kelv equilibrium or basically if there was no atmosphere or 730 Kelvin surface temperature because of thean atmosphere that creates an enormous greenhouse effect but interes know this planet is somewhere in the middle it's about 15 Kelvin lower than Venus and about 30 Kelvin higher than Earth and even its size is a little bit smaller than Earth and a little bit bigger than Venus and so here we have this very intriguing world and as you can see in this image it's presented in three different types because we actually have no idea what the surface might be like it could have no atmosphere a little bit of atmosphere like Earth or atmosphere like Venus which would very likely dramatically change what's happening on the surface for example obviously with no atmosphere it might resemble something like I guess Mars a dry empty world that goes through some extreme changes between the day and the night but with a slightly thicker atmosphere similar to Earth here the temperatures might be a little bit higher possibly as high as 60° C on the surface which would make this a somewhat difficult world to survive on but this planet is also very likely tidily locked and so it would have certain locations that would be a lot more hospitable lastly with the vution runway greenhouse effect like atmosphere or basically a very thick atmosphere atere temperatures here would be pretty hot possibly hundreds of Celsius with extremely dry conditions and very likely something similar to what's happening on Venus and so here we have these three options or maybe there's a fourth option that we cannot think of yet because this is obviously a completely different star system I mean for one maybe this planet contains a sulfur Rich atmosphere and is does actually cooler breathing its temperatures much closer to planet Earth either way though this discovery is currently super exciting it's essentially the closest transiting earthlike exoplanet that's now officially the best potential Target for the James web Space Telescope to start looking for habitable conditions on exoplanets and this is even a better planet to look at than the trapist one planets or the very close to us Proxima B and that's because this planet is not transiting the only way we can actually detect atmospheres and find out what these planets are like is of course if the these planets form a shadow in front of a star this planet does proximately B doesn't and by itself this is a huge Discovery because by focusing on the light that passes through the very thin layer of the atmosphere right here the researchers can find out everything there is to find out about this planet at least in terms of what's actually on a Surface what kind of a light is reflected from the surface what the atmosphere is made out of and then start making conclusions about is this habitable is there maybe live here and even start using statistics in order to find out if this applies to the majority of M type stars in the Milky Way galaxy because if there is something going on here it's extremely likely that this is actually a very common phenomenon in other words by exploring what's happening on this planet we can start drawing conclusions about a much wider sample of various planets discovered in the last few decades around many red dwarfs and so out of thousands of planets discovered around various star systems out there this one actually right now is one of the most exciting ones what this planet discovered using the NASA test Space Telescope along with the Muscat 2 and Muscat 3 cameras they're are part of the Subaru telescope run by the Japanese astronomers but because this is a very very recent discovery there's unfortunately not much else we know we actually don't even know the mass of this pate it just seems to be much less massive than about 3.9 masses of planet Earth but that doesn't tell us much so even the m Mass here has not been measured yet and that's because to measure the mass the researchers have to use the radial velocity method you see right here where we observe the star being pulled by the planet through observations of red shifts and blue shifts this hasn't been done yet so the mass is unknown but because its orbital period is 12.8 days we know that this is in the habitable zone that's the usual period for planets orbiting redw Wars inhabitable zones but only time will tell if this is going to end up some kind of a super exciting planet or just another planet like trapist 1B and trapist 1 C that seem to be completely Barren and so basically we're going to know more once we get observations from the James web and once additional studies come out calculating additional properties and so until then we're basically going to assume that it's maybe one of these three scenarios and really only one seems to be exciting the one with the earthlike atmosphere but the chance of this happening around this planet right now is kind of low and so once there are some additional discoveries and additional calculations we'll come back and talk more about this in some of the future videos until then check out some of the previous videos on similar discoveries in the description below thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who learn about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support the channel patreon by joining the channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in your description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye-bye [Music] [Music] e

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 182,387

Keywords: gliese 12b, gliese-12b, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, k2-18b, dms, alien life, alien biosignature, jwst, james webb space telescope, discovery of life, life on other planets, dms biosignature, extraterrestrial life, life outside of earth, dms planet, discovery of alien life, aliens found, Dimethyl sulfide

Id: KYkRrGj-7OY

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024