Citizens spot an unusual planet in the living area of ​​"Golden Pig"

Citizens have discovered a new, rare type of planet outside our solar system, which is about twice the size of Earth, located in a living environment, or in a golden zone, around its star where there is running water on the surface of the exoplanet.

"This is a very exciting discovery because of its moderate orbits, and because planets of this size are relatively rare," said Adina Feinstein, a postgraduate student at the University of Chicago and author of the article describing the find. press release.

The announcement was officially announced at a semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle on Monday. This article will be published in The Astronomical Journal.

The new planet is called K2-288Bb and, just like fictitious the planet Tatooine from the Star Wars can be found in the binary star system. In other words, all foreign life forms on the surface of this world, distant 226 light years, are often dug in the light of two suns.

All this additional sunlight can not be equal to the level of sun and heat, which makes Tatoo's desert planet. This is because the K2-288Bb circulates around the dimmer of the two cold M-rod stars in the system.

M-dots also come along with high incidence potential sterilization of solar torches.

If the planet does not blow up due to radiation, the new and disconnected paper, co-authored by Harvard's Abraham Loeb, shows that he could get enough energy to support life. (You may recall that Loeb made waves last year, with a study that suggested an interstellar object that could actually be Oumuamua a probe made from aliens.)

Loeb and post-doctoral researcher Mansavi Lingam find that a small number of M-pancakes must be as massive as at least one-fifth as our sun to maintain photosynthesis, oxygen accumulation and biosphere that supports life on all planets circulating in their living areas. This article will be published in the monthly announcements of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The K2-288Bb star reaches a threshold of mass equal to about one third of our sun. Such a star is "theoretically capable of maintaining biosphere with the same productivity as Earth," according to Loeb and Lingam.

It's too premature to say what the surface of the new planet would be. It could have been a relatively large rocky planet, or it would be a small, uneasy world of Neptune, which is quite different from ours. So far, only a few exoplanets of this unusual size have been found.

The discovery of the K2-288Bb is also interesting because it was largely observed with the help of volunteers who viewed with their eyes the light data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, rather than just picking up the software that analyzed it data. Citizen scientists who participated in the Exoplanet Explorers program could have noticed a planet that had missed the algorithms.

"We needed sharp eyes from civil scientists to make this extremely valuable find and warn us," Feinstein said.

Finding would help astronomers understand why there is a gap in the catalog of known exoplanets between so-called "super-Earth" and "mini-Neptune".

It also shows that Kepler is no longer and that he is his successor Exoplanet Transit Satellite, is already discovering its own knowledge, the pioneering spacecraft still lives on the basis of its data.

NASA has completed 60 years: the space agency took humanity longer than anyone else, and plans to go further.

Crowd Control: Scientific fantasy novel written by CNET reader.