Alien Planet with Earth’s Mass Discovered … But It’s an ‘Iceball’
A newfound alien world is quite Earth-like in some ways, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
The exoplanet, known as OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb, is about as massive as Earth and orbits its star at about the same distance Earth circles the sun. But OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb’s parent star is tiny and dim, meaning the alien planet is likely far too cold to host life, its discoverers said.
OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is not in Earth’s neck of the cosmic woods; the alien world lies nearly 13,000 light-years away. The astronomers spotted it using a technique called gravitational microlensing, which involves watching what happens when a massive body passes in front of a star. The closer object’s gravity bends and magnifies the background star’s light, acting like a lens.
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“This ‘iceball’ planet is the lowest-mass planet ever found through microlensing,” Yossi Shvartzvald, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. Shvartzvald is lead author of the study announcing the new planet’s existence, which was published online Wednesday (April 26) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. (You can read the paper for free at the journal’s website.)
The team was also able to determine that OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb’s host star is tiny, containing just 7.8 percent the mass of Earth’s sun.
That’s so small that the parent may not be a proper star at all, researchers said: Its mass is right on the boundary between the “failed stars” known as brown dwarfs and ultracool dwarf stars such as TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven recently discovered Earth-size planets.