They found Earth's possible "frozen twin" hidden in NASA files.

The yet-to-be-confirmed planet HD 137010 b orbits a Sun-like star 'only' 146 light-years away and takes about 355 days to make a complete revolution around its star.

They find Earth's possible "ice twins" hidden in NASA files

The as-yet-unconfirmed planet HD 137010 b orbits a Sun-like star "only" 146 light-years away and takes about 355 days to make a complete revolution around its star.

ExoPlanet HD 20794D, the 'super lab' searching for life beyond Earth

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Introduction If its existence is finally confirmed, it could be a world almost like ours.The rocky planet, which is only 6% larger than Earth, takes about 355 days to complete a full orbit around its star.Where we see the familiar sun from its surface, perhaps a little dimmer and more orange than ours, but a sun nonetheless.Very good.So much so that it could be the "Holy Grail" that astronomers have been searching for for decades: the long-awaited "Earth 2.0".

Now, even in this case, there are still significant differences.Because if we could travel 146 light-years away from this new world, we would likely find not a green forest or a blue ocean, but a white hell.A planet trapped in an eternal ice age is colder than Mars, with temperatures plunging to minus 68 degrees.

Hidden in the files

Its technical name is HD 137010 b, and it was presented to the public by an international team of astronomers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.The discovery is fascinating not only because of the planet, but also because of how it was found: hidden in the archives of a NASA mission, waiting to be discovered, which ended nearly eight years ago.

That's exactly what happened here. The Kepler space telescope, the greatest planet hunter in history, was honorably retired in 2018. But its legacy, a mountain of photometric data, remains a gold mine for scientists.

If we were to travel 146 light years away, we probably wouldn't find green forests or blue seas, but the white hell is colder than Mars.

Researces decided, guided by the Astrono Alexander Alexers Alex Mahner Havner Inx Planck Institute for Astronomy, Warning that information.The detail, they look at k2 of the telescope.And there, in view of the 2017, they see something: a little fall, almost impossible to see the light hh 137010.

It's just a bottle.The small ',, a transport' for a long time in which part of the world, you have faced a day."It's the same as proximity and understanding."

However, you need to be very careful and patient before confirming the result.Because currently HD 137010 b is only a "candidate".What does this mean?Well, to make sure a planet is really a planet, the rules of astronomy require astronomers to see it pass in front of its star at least three times.This is the only way to accurately calculate your orbit and rule out "something else" like an instrument error or a simple star spot.

However, there's a problem: HD 137010 b takes about a year to make a complete revolution around its star.Kepler is no longer operational, and current telescopes such as TESS (by NASA) or CHOPS (by ESA) typically observe regions of the sky for a very short period of time, only a month."Hunting" a planet with such a large orbit is, surprisingly, much more difficult than finding worlds that spin madly around their star in a matter of days or hours.

big "snowball"

But we are optimistic, and we assume that the planet is finally confirmed, something that Venner's team, based on their mathematical models, is fully confident.

Let's see.The host star is a K-type dwarf. It is a 'cousin' to our Sun (which is a G-type dwarf), but it is somewhat cooler, smaller and less luminous.Which has a direct consequence: although the planet orbits at a distance almost identical to ours, it receives less than a third of the light and heat that we receive from the Sun.

Unlike Earth's other "twins" around faint stars or very distant stars, this new world orbits a bright sun and is close enough to study in depth.

The result is a frozen world.Early calculations indicate that the surface temperature is -68 degrees Celsius, colder than Mars, which has an average temperature of -65 degrees.Despite this, the authors of the study do not rule out the possibility that HD 137010 b is a source of life and remind us in their paper that habitability is a flexible concept.

For example, if HD 137010 b has a dense atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide (more so than ours), the greenhouse effect would warm the surface enough to preserve liquid water.According to the researchers' models, there is a 51% chance of the planet falling within the "optimistic habitable zone" and 40% in the conservative zone.It is a coin tossed in the air, where "heads" is an inert snowball and "tails" is a world with cold oceans under a heavy atmosphere.

A 'different' world

And why is an unconfirmed planet causing such a stir when a handful of Earth-like worlds have already been discovered?

Because, until now, people like Earth often have problems: they revolve around red dwarf stars (very different from the Sun, a fast and deadly flare), or they are far from us and they are impossible to study.

According to the researchers' models, there is a 50% chance for this inert snow, and another 50% chance that a dense atmosphere protects oceans of liquid water under the ice.

There we have, for example, Kepler 452b, named in 2015 as Earth's "older cousin" but which is 1,400 light years away, too far away to study its atmosphere.Or Kepler-186f, the first Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, but which, in addition to being almost 500 light years away, orbits a red dwarf much cooler and fainter than the Sun.

HD 137010 b, however, is 'next door', only 146 light-years away. Its star is also bright enough (magnitude 10) that we can point our telescope at it and get good data. In the words of Chelsea Huang, the author of the study, "the next best world around a star like the Sun and the habitable zone is about four times farther away and 20 times fainterGive up."

Looking for confirmation

The confirmation of HD 137010 b is now in the hands of the next generation of telescopes.It will be a titanic task due to its long orbit.Perhaps ESA's PLATO space telescope, scheduled to launch in late 2026, will have the "patience" to watch until we see another pass.We have to keep the center.

Meanwhile, HD 137010 b is clearly our best lab today.It could be a dormant world, an icy space floating in darkness.

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