NEW EXOPLANET TWICE THE SIZE OF EARTH FOUND

Using data from NASA’S Kepler Space Telescope, an international team of scientists has discovered a new exoplanet twice the size of Earth and about 145 light years away.

The exoplanet ‘Wolf 503b’ is in the Virgo constellation and it orbits its star every six days and is thus very close to it, about 10 times closer than Mercury is to the Sun.

“‘Wolf 503b’ is one of the only planets with a radius near the gap that has a star that is bright enough to be amenable to more detailed study that will better constrain its true nature,” explained Bjorn Benneke, professor at the Universite de Montreal in Canada.

“It provides a key opportunity to better understand the origin of this radius gap as well as the nature of the intriguing populations of ‘superearths’ and ‘sub-neptunes’ as a whole.”

The star is an old “orange dwarf,” slightly less luminous than the Sun but about twice as old, and allowed a precise determination of the radius of both the star and its companion, the researchers explained.