Astronomers have discovered a distant, Earth-like planet that provides a frightening picture of what our planet could look like billions of years from now.
Planet Earth PHOTO: Shutterstock
This newly discovered planet may have once been habitable and orbited a star similar to how we orbit the Sun. However, its host star at some point suffered a violent death, causing it to break loose and drift away from us in space.
Some studies suggest that the sun will begin its dying process in about a billion years. When that time comes, our planet might have “a fate similar to that of this newly discovered planet”, according to dailymail.
It was first observed in 2020, but a team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, recently took another look at this planetary system using the 10-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii.
What the study revealed
The research team published their results Thursday, Sept. 26, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers first noticed this distant planetary system when it passed in front of a more distant star in 2020, amplifying its light by 1,000 times.
This is what is called a “microlensing event”. When a planetary system passes in front of a star, the system’s gravity acts like a lens that focuses and magnifies the light from the background star.
Researchers at the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute -KASI) analyzed this event and were able to determine that “the system consists of a star with a mass about half that of our sun, an Earth-sized planet, and another enormous planet 17 times more massive than Jupiter.”
They also concluded that “the distance between the Earth-sized planet and the star is roughly equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun.”
But the team has not determined what type of star the planets orbit.
To answer this question, Zhang, Lu, and their colleague Joshua Bloom—a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley—decided to take another look at this distant planetary system using the 10-meter Keck II telescope in Hawaii.
They observed the system three years after the event of “gravitational microlensing”. Due to this moment, the background star was no longer magnified and had become faint enough for the star “lens” – the star that is part of the planetary system – be visible.
But Zhang and his colleagues saw nothing. A normal star could easily have been seen. This fact, corroborated with other known details about the star “lens”, led the researchers to conclude that it might just be “a white dwarf”.
“This is a case where seeing nothing is actually more interesting than seeing something,” said Lu.
This study provides a unique insight into what the far future of our planet and sun might look like.
