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A University of Warwick researcher has found 60 exoplanets that could potentially harbor life. They achieved this with the help of a space telescope from the American space program NASA.
By observing data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scientists at the University of Warwick have found 85 exoplanets, planets that orbit a star other than our sun. Sixty of these are brand new discoveries. The other 25 were previously discovered using other search methods.
The exoplanets all have their own star and are all larger than our planet Earth. Thousands of exoplanets have been identified in the past, but this time it is striking that the 85 newly discovered planets are the right distance from their star to have a temperature that could support life.
However, much is still unclear about exoplanets. “Some can be rocky, some can be gaseous. “It’s quite rare for habitable planets to be discovered – you need very specific conditions to be habitable and further research is needed to confirm this,” lead researcher Faith Hawthorn from Warwick University’s astronomy department told US media .
Further research required
Hawthorn is not the only scientist using TESS data to search for planets, among other things. The satellite was launched in 2018 to search for changes in the brightness of the nearest stars in space. Astronomers therefore look for “transitions” in the data. These transits should indicate that a planet is briefly blocking the light of a star.
“There is still a lot of room for further study of these exoplanets – to find out more about their exact orbital periods, whether or not they have moons and what exactly they are made of,” explains Hawthorn.
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