The newly discovered planet is several times larger than Earth. It is being called a super-Earth planet, which has raised new hopes for the existence of life.
The report says that research by Oxford University has found a super-Earth planet outside the solar system. This has raised new hopes for the possibility of life. The planet is called HD 20794 d. It is six times larger than Earth. Scientists believe that the planet may have liquid water on its surface. It is located just 20 light-years from Earth and is orbiting in the habitable zone of a star like the Sun.
Dr. Michael Cretignier, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, described the discovery as "exciting." He said there is potential for future missions to take images.
The report says that instead of a circular orbit like Earth, the planet rotates in a circular path, which creates some uncertainty about the possibility of life existing on this planet.
Dr. Cretignier discovered the planet's existence in 2022 while analyzing data stored by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. After detecting a possible signal, an international team of researchers reviewed two decades of observations to confirm the planet's existence.
"It was a huge joy for me when we finally confirmed its existence," said Dr. Cretignier. "It was also a relief, because the initial signal was at the edge of the spectrograph's detection limit, which made it difficult to confirm at first."
Dr. Cretignier believes the planet could be very important for future space missions, especially those looking for possible chemical signs (biosignatures) of life on distant planets.
He said the planet could play an important role in future life-searching missions. It is one of the closest Earth-like planets we know of and its orbit is highly unusual.
NDTV reported that the results of this study, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, are marked as a significant advance in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.
