The greatest contender so far for a watery, Earth-like exoplanet is a world about 100 light-years away. Dimensional and mass data for this object, designated TOI-1452b, are compatible with a density profile that would support the presence of a worldwide liquid ocean. While scientists haven’t uncovered proof of the existence of such planets, they do think they exist.
The first findings are quite exciting, but they will need to be followed up by data from the James Webb Space Telescope in order to analyze the exoplanet’s atmosphere and make a more definitive decision on the nature of TOI-1452b. The exoplanet was discovered revolving around one of a pair of tiny, faint red dwarfs that form a tight binary system and are just 97 AU apart. Those two stars are so close together that they look like one.
But the TESS exoplanet-hunting telescope has become sensitive enough to identify transits, which are periodic, weak dips in brightness that suggest a regular passage of an object between us and its home star. The team next returned to Canada’s Mont Mégantic Observatory, where they used a similarly sensitive device built to detect planetary transits.
Using their combined data, both observatories confirmed that an exoplanet orbits one of the stars in the TOI-1452 binary system. The astronomers determined the exoplanet’s size to be a manageable 1.672 times that of Earth by measuring the star’s brightness before and after the exoplanet passed in front of it.
It has an 11-day orbit around its star, making it seem very near to us as we go around the sun in 365 days. The exoplanet is located smack in the heart of the star’s temperate zone, yet since the star is so cold and faint in comparison to the Sun, this is a very comfortable location indeed. This distance from the star is just right; it’s not so far away that any water on its crust would freeze from the temperature or so near that it would vaporize from the star’s heat.
