Ross 508b, the newly discovered super-Earth just 37 light-years away, could have life

A lot of us have wondered, “Are we the only ones in this universe?” Even though we don’t have a clear answer to this question yet, scientists are always looking for signs that could point to the existence of life on other planets.

And what better way to start than to try to find other planets like Earth that might be able to support life?

Exoplanets have been the subject of a lot of research lately, though the reasons for these studies vary from one group to the next. Some just want to find out if there is alien life, while others want to find a second home for people from Earth.

Fans of extrasolar planets, we may have some good news for you. The Subaru Strategic Program, which was started in 2007 to get amazing scientific results from Japan’s Subaru Telescope, has helped find a super-Earth just 37 light-years from Earth, on the edge of the habitable zone of a red dwarf star.

Home while you’re away?

The recently found Ross 508 planet system is shown in a simplified way. The green area is the habitable zone (HZ), which is where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. The path of the planets is shown by a blue line. The planet should be closer to the HZ (solid line) than the HZ (dashed line) for more than half of its orbit and within the HZ for the rest. (Institute for Astrobiology)This “super-Earth,” called Ross 508b, is a rocky world with about four times the mass of Earth.

And on Ross 508b, a year is only 11 Earth days long. This means, of course, that its orbit is not very big, which makes sense since red dwarfs are much smaller than the Sun, which is the center of our solar system.

But because they aren’t as big as the Sun, their gravitational fields aren’t as big either. So, Ross 508b circles it at a distance of only 5 million kilometers. Mercury, on the other hand, is about 60 million kilometers away from the Sun. Given how close this super-Earth is to its red dwarf, it’s hard to see how it could be considered habitable. Well, Ross 508b’s orbit is elliptical, which means it isn’t always as close to the star and kind of dips in and out of the habitable zone.

This kind of planet might be able to keep water on its surface. Whether or not there is water or life there is still something that needs to be researched and talked about.

 

The link between red dwarfs and planets that can support life

Three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy are red dwarfs, which are smaller than the Sun and are very common near the Sun. Because of this, they are important targets in the search for nearby extrasolar planets and life beyond Earth.

But red dwarfs are cooler than other types of stars and give off less light that we can see. This makes it hard to study them.

The fact that this is the first exoplanet found by the Subaru Strategic Program using the infrared spectrograph IRD on the Subaru Telescope makes it even more exciting (IRD-SSP).

IRD was made by a group at the Astrobiology Center in Japan to look for planets like Ross 508b that orbit red dwarfs. It uses a method for finding planets that looks for tiny changes in the speed of a star to figure out if a planet is orbiting it.

 

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think that the Subaru Telescope could help us find even better candidates for planets that could support life around red dwarfs.

“IRD’s development has been going on for 14 years. We have kept building and learning in the hopes of finding another planet just like Ross 508b “IRD-leader, SSP’s Professor Bun’ei Sato of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said this.

This study has made it possible to do more research to see if there is life around low-mass stars.