By A planet like the earth that slides through a livable zone around its parent star has been found by a new team of astronomers. Nicknamed Ross 508 B, this planet is actually Super-Earth, which means its size is about four times our planet’s mass and may have a condition that allows water to be liquid. This discovery has made scientists interested because exoplanet can function as an important target for future observation to verify the possibility of living around low mass stars.
It should be noted that this planet transmits a red dwarf star named Ross 508 in and out of the livable zone as opposed to the earth, who orbits the sun on a sustainable road. Red dwarf stars are smaller but longer live than our own sun and they are also relatively cooler because of their size. Ross 508, in this case, about one fifth of the mass of the sun and exoplanets around it complements one orbit in less than 11 days.
The new exoplanet has been found using a new infrared monitoring technique through an instrument called the Instrument Instrument Doppler (IRD) developed by the Astrobiology Center in Japan. The instrument which is the world’s first high precision infrared spectrograph for 8 meters class telescopes, installed at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to detect minutes of minutes in the speed of red dwarf stars. The use of infrared instruments arises because the red dwarf is very fainting in the visible light because of its low surface temperature less than 4000 ° C.
Ross 508 B is the first detection of the success of the Super-Earth using only infrared-approach spectroscopy”, Dr. Hiroki Harakawa (Naoj Subaru Telescope), the main author of the Discovery paper, said in a statement. “It’s been 14 years since the start of the IRD development. We have continued our development and research in the hope of finding a planet exactly like Ross 508 B”, Professor Bun’ei Sato from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Principal of the IRD Project IRD said the investigator.