A newly discovered planet may be suitable for life

An international team of scientists said it has discovered two new super-Earth type planets about 100 light-years away from our solar system, one of which may be suitable for life.

Researchers at Belgium's University of Liège announced Wednesday that they found another one while using Earth-based telescopes to confirm the existence of a different planet initially discovered by a NASA satellite in the same solar system.

NASA's satellite found planet LP 890-9b, which is about 30% larger than Earth and orbits its sun in just 2.7 days. ULiège researchers used their SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes in Chile and Spain to take a closer look at the planet with high-precision cameras.

That's when they discovered another planet, LP 890-9c (renamed SPECULOOS-2c by the ULiège researchers), which is 40% larger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit its sun.

"Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation it receives is still low, and could allow the presence of liquid water on the planet's surface, provided it has a sufficient atmosphere," said Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and one of the main co-authors of the paper. "This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star."

Full article at npr.org