A group of scientists from Belgium, Switzerland, England and the United States has announced the discovery of a new exoplanet called Speculoos-3b, which rotates around the Red Dwarf Star.
Speculoos-3b has a size similar to the ground and is at a distance of 55 light years from the ground. It takes 17 hours to rotate around the star.
According to the publication in the Nature Astronomy Scientific Journal, the opening of the Speculoos-3b was the result of the Special Specialist project, which was designed to search for exoplanets. A network of telescopes around the world was installed for this purpose.
The planet was noticed when it periodically wandered in front of a dwarf star, leading to the darkness of light. It is more than twice as cold as the sun, but 10 times smaller and 100 times less bright, so it will shine longer, the researchers said.
"We have created Speculoos specifically to observe the adjacent overhead dwarf stars in the search for rocky planets that can be studied in detail," Michelle Gillon explained, an astronomer from Liege University (Belgium).
Amauri Trio, a professor of exoplanetology at Birmingham University, noted that although the overhead dwarf stars are colder and smaller than the sun, their life expectancy is much longer - about 100 billion years. Scientists suggest that these will be the last stars that will shine in the universe.
In their opinion, it can open up opportunities for the development of life on the orbital planets. However, in the case of Speculoos-3b, any body will face an extremely harsh environment. Due to the narrow orbit, it receives almost 16 times more energy than the land.
"In such an environment, the probability of an atmosphere around the planet is very small," stressed Julien de Vit, a planetist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
Scientists have also added that in the future they will observe exoplanets using telescope James Webba to get information about their surface and potential atmosphere.
