What is the most tantalising thing about Earth? why is it so?
Answers
Answer:
The planet is Ross 128 b, orbiting a star called Ross 128. And it's this star that was the focus of a new study, led by astronomer Diogo Souto of Brazil's Observatório Nacional.
Using the APOGEE spectrograph at the 2.5-metre Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in the US, the researchers analysed the star's near-infrared light to figure out its chemical makeup, using a technique developed by Souto last year.
"Until recently, it was difficult to obtain detailed chemical abundances for this kind of star," he said.
Ross 128 is a red dwarf. Most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, around 70 percent. They are cooler and smaller than our Sun, and it's estimated that most of them have planets.
Because red dwarfs are so cool, their habitable Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life - is a lot closer than the distance between Earth and the Sun.
However, most red dwarfs are very active. Proxima Centauri, another red dwarf orbited by a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone, is much closer than Ross 128, but it also belches out so many flares that it's unlikely life could survive on any planets around it.
IT HAS LIFE EXPLANATION...