A rocky planet that’s the right distance from its star to be hospitable to life likely has an atmosphere, a new study claims.
The exoplanet, known as LHS 1140 b, is about 49 light-years away from Earth, which means it is a relatively close neighbor, given that the Milky Way is more than 100,000 light-years across. The world was found in 2017 and was even then considered to be a prime candidate in the search for planets that could host life. Now researchers have announced the discovery of helium leaking from LHS 1140 b into space, and that only makes the possibility that life could exist on the planet more likely, says Collin Cherubim, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
Cherubim is lead author of the study detailing the new findings, which was published in Science on Thursday. He points out that LHS 1140 b meets the big three criteria for being habitable: it’s rocky, it has the right temperature to support liquid water and now there’s proof that it has an atmosphere.
“This is the only planet that we know has all three of those things, and it happens to be relatively nearby,” he says. “Another huge thing, which is really, really awesome, is that it happens to be orbiting a relatively quiet star,” one that isn’t prone to battering the exoplanet with coronal mass ejections and other catastrophic eruptions.
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