NASA detected Earth-sized planet that could have liquid water on its surface

A rocky, Earth-sized planet that could be habitable has been sighted 100 light-years away. It was discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft and has been given the name TOI 700 e.

The reason the letter ‘e’ is there is because astronomers have previously found three planets in the star system it’s in, named TOI 700 b, c, and d. It has taken scientists a year of TESS observations to identify TOI 700 e, which orbits at a distance from its star where there could be liquid water on its surface.

The planet is 95 percent the size of Earth and probably rocky, NASA said. In addition, it is located in a habitable zone. This is one of the few systems with multiple small planets in habitable zones that we know ofsaid Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, who led the research.

“Planet e is approximately 10 percent smaller than planet dso the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us find ever smaller worlds.”

Astronomers say that the worlds probably are tidally locked, in the same way that the Earth is with the moon. It means that they rotate only once per orbit and one side always faces the star, as is the case with our lunar satellite.

TOI 700 e, which also may be tidally lockedtakes 28 days to orbit its star, which puts planet e between planets c and d in the so-called optimistic habitable zone: the range of distances from a star where liquid surface water might be present.

This area straddles the conservative habitable zonethe range where researchers assume liquid water could exist for most of the planet’s lifetime.

The follow-up study of the TOI 700 system with space and ground observatories is ongoing, Gilbert said, and may yield more information about this rare system.

“TESS has just completed its second year of northern sky observations,” said Allison Youngblood, a research astrophysicist and associate TESS project scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

So far, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets in search of signs of extraterrestrial life or in the hope of learning more about our own solar system.

However, this is only a small fraction of those that exist only in the Milky Way. (YO)