No, there probably aren’t any aliens. But these exoplanets can help us figure out where aliens might be. Here’s your friendly reminder that our solar system is a molecule of water in the ocean of the universe.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey, known as TESS, has spotted a buzzing galactic neighbourhood just 33 light-years away from our planet. It has a central star, a few planets orbiting that star, and according to the scientists behind the discovery of this alternate reality, the pack contains at least two terrestrial, Earth-sized worlds.
If you could travel at a tenth the speed of light, it would take you 330 years to reach this Solar System-like place in the Milky Way. However, this is not possible for several reasons.
But by using specialized Earth-born equipment such as telescopes and space-borne spectrometers – perhaps even the James Webb Space Telescope once it boots up and is online – we can paint a much clearer picture of what this neighbourhood might look like.
With that in mind, researchers are presenting comprehensive details about this multiplanet system at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California, on Wednesday so that the world of astronomy can shortlist these new exoplanets for critical exoplanet studies.
And they’ve already provided a sneak peek into their findings in a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So far, we know that the system’s host star is called HD 260655 and is relatively small, cold, and classified as an M-dwarf. M-dwarfs are much less massive than our Sun, a G-type main-sequence star, yet ten times more massive than the entire universe.
The inner planet orbits its star every 2.8 Earth days and is about 1.2 times Earth’s size and twice as massive. The second alien world orbits every 5.7 Earth days and is 1.5 times Earth’s size and three times as huge. They are both considered “rocky”.
