Two Potentially Earth-Like Alien Planets Found Around Nearby Star

[Judi Lynn]

By Elizabeth Howell 4 hours ago

There are even more potentially habitable planets near Earth than we ever imagined. A research team discovered two Earth-like planets in our cosmic backyard, and they're located in the perfect zone for water to form on their presumably rocky surfaces.

The planets orbit a sun known as "Teegarden's star," which is only 12.5 light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, or roughly 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers.) The two planets look an awful lot like Earth and our neighboring worlds, the researchers said.

"The two planets resemble the inner planets of our solar system," lead author Mathias Zechmeister, a research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, said in a statement. "They are only slightly heavier than Earth and are located in the so-called habitable zone, where water can be present in liquid form."

The results were obtained as part of the CARMENES search for exoplanets; CARMENES stands for "Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs."

More:
https://www.space.com/teegarden-star-two-earth-like-planets.html

[VMA131Marine]

1. These planets are close enough to their star

that there is a high likelihood of them being tidally locked like the Moon is to Earth, and Mercury is to the Sun.

[qazplm135]

2. Yep

So probably not the best weather conditions