Is there life out there?

STUDY: EXOPLANET GLIESE 486B IS ‘ROCKY IN NATURE, LIKE THE EARTH’

Researchers to try to determine if there is an ‘atmosphere’.

– Searching for traces of life on Mars, like Nasa doing, is one thing.

But scientists are also looking further afield. Could it be found beyond our solar system?

A study published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science reveals the discovery of a new exoplanet that could be instrumental in the hunt.

Researchers will try to determine whether there is an atmosphere on the “super-Earth” and traces of life around a star other than our Sun.

“The end of the road is finding biomarkers or biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets, which is signs of life on habitable Earth-like planets,” said Jose Caballero, an astronomer at Spain’s

Centro de Astrobiologia and one of the co-authors of the study.

About 4 000 exoplanets have been discovered during the past 25 years and some have been found to have an atmosphere.

But these are “gaseous planets or icy planets”, Caballero said, and planets the size of Earth have not been investigated yet.

The latest discovery is “rocky in nature, like the Earth”, he said.

The name of the exoplanet is Gliese 486b and it is “only” 26 light years away.

It is about 30% larger than Earth but with a mass 2.8 times that of our planet and is located in what is called a habitable zone around a star.

Twho methods were used to identify it: “transit photometry” – slight variations in a star’s brightness as a planet passes in front of it – and “doppler radial velocity,” which measures the “wobbling” of stars from the gravitational pull of orbiting planets. – AFP