Saturday, August 20

Another Home 39 Light Years Away?

Gliese 1132b, which is about 1.2 times the size of Earth, orbits the red dwarf star GJ 1132, which itself is only about 20 percent the size of our sun. And now we learn the exoplanet, about 39 light years from Earth, may contain oxygen in its atmosphere. 

But that is as far as it goes. Oxygen or not, the planet seems hostile to life. As noted in Sci-News, Dr. Laura Schaefer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has bad news:
On cooler planets, oxygen could be a sign of alien life and habitability...But on a hot planet like GJ 1132b, it’s a sign of the exact opposite – a planet that’s being baked and sterilized.
How hot is it? About 450 degrees Fahrenheit. So not the a very likely candidate for life as we know it. 
This is just a theory for now, yet science is taking us further and further each year, and atmospheric studies of exoplanets is just around the corner. So the search will continue.