(Daily News Scan - DNS English) Goldilocks Zone
A new planet similar to the size of the Earth has been discovered. The report released by NASA confirmed the discovery of a new planet named TOI 700 d. This new planet orbits its star in its habitable zone. This zone is also known as Goldilocks zone.
The new planet is found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Satellite (TESS) mission. The satellite was launched in 2018. TESS was designed
and launched specifically to find Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars.
The new planet orbits its star in its habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone.
Goldilocks zone is the area around a star where it is not too hot or too cold
for liquid water to exist on the surface of surrounding planets. Our planet
Earth is in the Goldilocks Zone.
TOI 700 d is the first planet discovered by TESS satellite. The name is an allusion to the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which a young girl samples three bowls of porridge and finds that one is "just right - not too hot and not too cold". Very few Earth sized planets have been found out of which some were found by NASA’s Kepler mission. The discovery of this new planet was confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope. This telescope helped in sharpening the measurements that TESS had made, such as orbital period and size. TOI 700 d is the outermost planet, and the only one in the star’s habitable zone.
In comparison to the Earth, the new planet is 20% larger. It orbits its star once every 37 days and receives energy that is equal to 86% of the energy that the sun provides to Earth. The star- TOI 700 is an “M dwarf”. It is located 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. It is roughly 40% of our Sun’s mass and size, and has about half its surface temperature.
M dwarf or M-type star, also called as Red Dwarf Star are the most numerous type of stars in the universe and these are the smallest type of hydrogen-burning star. The mass of these varies from about 0.08 to 0.6 times that of the Sun. In the milky way Galaxy around three- fourth of the stars are red dwarfs.
The other two planets that orbit the same star are - TOI 700 b and TOI 700 c. TOI 700 b is accurately the size of the earth and completes an orbit inn every 10 days. TOI 700 c is 2.6 times larger than Earth and is gas dominated. It covers its orbit in every 16 days.
If our planet Earth was in place of Pluto all its water would freeze; on the other hand, if Earth was where Mercury is, all its water would boil off. Different stars have different Goldilocks zone.
Efforts are being made to find more such planets which have similarities like Earth.
