NEW PLANET FOUND: TOI~715 b
Written by: Caleb J Reeves
A NASA telescope in orbit around our planet has discovered a fascinating new world - a super-Earth measuring 30 to 70 percent larger than our home planet.
Within a distant solar system, lies an exoplanet known as TOI-715 b that offers promising prospects for hosting extraterrestrial life forms due to its location inside the 'Goldilocks' zone and similar size to our home planet (approximately 1.5x bigger).
NASA explained on its website that the distance between a star and its planet is crucial in determining whether liquid water can form on the surface of the latter. The ideal distance, also known as the Goldilocks zone or habitable zone, ensures that the temperature on the planet's surface neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.
TOI-715 b is a exoplanet that orbits very close to its star, with each orbit lasting only 19 days. Despite its proximity to the star, scientists do not believe it is a scorching world because the star itself is much cooler and smaller than our sun.
NASA's TESS satellite uses the transit method to detect exoplanets like TOI-715 b by measuring the dimming of a star's light caused by an orbiting planet passing between it and Earth. The duration and frequency of these events can provide valuable information about the exoplanet's size, shape, composition, and atmospheric properties.
The rocky planets orbiting cooler red dwarf stars offer an optimum setting to search for surroundings that might create circumstances hospitable to life due to their short durations of about 19 days on average, making them more susceptible to discovery through the transit technique utilizing instruments like NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or other highly capable next-generation ground-based observatories currently being built in Chile & Hawaii respectively.
Astronomers aim to further examine TOI-715 b with the James Webb Space Telescope, an observatory positioned approximately 1 million miles from Earth. With its ability to peer inside the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, Webb is poised to offer deeper insights into the nature of these worlds.
With approximately 2 trillion observable planets in our universe, the possibility of extraterrestrial life on at least one planet is highly likely. It's simply a matter of time before we discover it.
I like to use this example when speaking on ET life within the vastness of our beautiful and mysterious Universe; "if you took a cup and scooped up a cup of water out of our worlds oceans and did not scoop up a fish in the cup, would you be so ignorant as to claim that there are NO fish in the entirety of the ocean"?? It's almost impossible that there wouldn't be life outside of our distorted reality and human belief systems.. ET's are real.. it's no longer the question of is there any ET life out there but rather the question is now when will we meet them?
CJR♥︎999♥︎2/8/24
(MLA/SOURCE)
(www.nasa.gov)
February 08, 2024