- UK scientists have discovered Gliese 12b, a new planet that could potentially support human life, located just 40 light years away
- The planet has a temperature of around 42°C, allowing for the possibility of liquid water on its surface
- The team is set to examine the planet’s atmosphere to assess its habitability.
UK scientists have discovered a new planet, Gliese 12b, that could potentially support human life, and it’s relatively close in space terms.
The planet, located just 40 light years away, has a temperature around 42°C, making it one of the few known planets where humans could theoretically survive.
Larissa Palethorpe from the University of Edinburgh explained,
“It’d be uncomfortable for a human, but the way we define ‘habitability’ is that liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet, which in this case it could.”
Palethorpe and her team used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to discover Gliese 12b, which took them less than a year to calculate its size, temperature, and orbital patterns.
The planet is comparable in size to Venus and orbits its sun, a cool red dwarf named Gliese 12, every 12.8 days.
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Despite its proximity, reaching Gliese 12b with current technology would take around 300,000 years. Warwick’s Professor Thomas Wilson highlighted the rarity of such discoveries, saying,
“Planets like Gliese 12b are few and far between, so for us to be able to examine one this closely and learn about its atmosphere and temperature is very rare.”
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The next step for scientists is to study the planet’s atmosphere to determine its habitability.
“It could actually be a planet with no atmosphere, which would mean it’s not that habitable,” Palethorpe noted. “Ideally for habitability, you want a thin atmosphere – thick-atmosphere planets tend to be too hot.”
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This analysis will help determine if Gliese 12b could indeed support human life in the future.
