Scientists have discovered "Venus' twin," and it's one of the closest exoplanets ever discovered.
The rocky planet, dubbed GJ 1132b, is Earth-sized and rocky, MIT reported. It is orbiting a star only 39 light years away, which is considered basically next door to our own solar system. The planet is so close by that scientists are optimistic we will be able to learn more about it than any previously known planet. GJ 1132b is a scorching 500 degrees Fahrenheit, and is almost certainly not hospitable for liquid water or life, but could still have a substantial atmosphere.
"If we find this pretty hot planet has managed to hang onto its atmosphere over the billions of years it's been around, that bodes well for the long-term goal of studying cooler planets that could have life," said Zachory Berta-Thompson, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "We finally have a target to point our telescopes at, and [can] dig much deeper into the workings of a rocky exoplanet, and what makes it tick."
The scientists discovered the planet using the MEarth-South Observatory, a Harvard University-led array of eight 40-centimeter-wide robotic telescopes in the mountains of Chile. Based on the size and proximity of the planet compared to its star, the researchers were able to determine its high temperatures.
"The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it's like burnt-cookie hot," Berta-Thompson said. "It's too hot to be habitable-there's no way there's liquid water on the surface. But it is a lot cooler than the other rocky planets that we know of."
Most known rocky exoplanets are thousands of degrees and too hot to host any type of atmosphere. This new finding is exciting because it could provide key insights into the atmospheres of exoplanets.
"We think it's the first opportunity we have to point our telescopes at a rocky exoplanet and get that kind of detail, to be able to measure the color of its sunset, or the speed of its winds, and really learn how rocky planets work out there in the universe," Berta-Thompson says. "Those will be exciting observations to make."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature.
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