A student Astronomy ITB vision binoculars installing equipment that can reach the stars up to distance of 200 miles on the Expo ITB ITB Campus, Bandung, West Java, Saturday (22/03/08). (AFP / Rezza Estily / ss / ama)
Jakarta (Antara News) – The discovery of “world tirta” new (the same planet Earth is abundant water) which mengorbiti one star within 40 light years became the first known planets like Earth and make people become close enough to sniff the atmosphere, astronomers said as quoted by the journal Nature.
Named GJ 1214b, the size of this planet is only about 2.7 times the size of planet Earth with a mass about 6.5 times heavier than Earth.
Based on the weight of its kind, scientists thought GJ 1214b contains 3 / 4 water liquid with a solid core of iron and nickel as well as hydrogen and helium atmosphere, which is similar to the Earth.
But in many other ways, this planet is a “cruel animal very different” from the Earth we live, the scientists said.
“Basically this is a vast ocean,” said principal investigator David Charbonneau of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“(On this planet) not a single continent that floats on top or up from the water.”
More than that, GJ 1214b hotter than the Earth and the atmosphere ten times thicker than our planet, the researchers said.
This may make it difficult to live any way we know so far. For starters, the atmospheric pressure against the surface of the planet is a huge and very little light through the mist difficult to achieve the planet’s oceans.
New planet like Earth is still very strange.
Super-Earth planet was discovered only by using MEarth project, a small telescope device unit based on Earth that is used to detect changes from minute to minute from the power light red stars dim nan called M dwarfs (dwarf stars).
Periodic Kelipan can starlight caused by planets transiting or separately around the stars. Since M dwarfs dwarf stars is more opaque than stars like the Sun, it becomes easier to trace the light power reduction caused by the planets the size of Earth’s smaller mass.
1214b GJ Although not directly visible, the change must be in the starlight due to trace his journey, allowing astronomers to measure the size and mass of the planet, which will offer clues to the planet’s composition.
And because the world tirta so close to Earth, according to Charbonneau, optical telescope based in space like the Hubble or the day Kepler can be used to sniff out the chemical content of the atmosphere must be similar to Earth’s planet.
“A number of the light from the star through the atmosphere that dwarf planets similar to Earth are (such as sunlight through the Earth), and attached to the features of atoms and molecules there anything,” said Charbonneau.
Overall, this discovery is “a milestone achievement” that could close the gap in the scientific planetologi, said Greg Laughin, astrophysics scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.
“I always imagined as if the form of a planetary mass of the Earth six times that. Now we know. Planet is really very different from our solar system,” said Laughlin. (*)
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