| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
The Oldest Habitable planet has been discovered
Two planets, Kapteyn B and C, and been discovered orbiting a star just 13 light years from Earth. One of these may be able to harbor alien life.
Kapteyn B is a planet over five times the size of Earth, and orbits its home star once every 48 days. The other newly-discovered world is larger still, and a year there lasts for 121 Earth-days.
The smaller planet, orbiting closer to its sun, is within the “habitable zone” of its star. Temperatures there could be right to allow liquid water to exist on its surface.
It is difficult to obtain much information about worlds around other stars. Astronomers are able to measure the mass of the planet, its distance from its sun and the length of the planet’s year. Determining the diameter of the planet and chemical makeup of its atmosphere can only rarely be accomplished.
One unusual feature of Kapteyn B is its age. Astronomers estimate the planet first formed roughly 11-and-a-half billion years ago. That would make the planet more than twice as old as our home world, and just two billion years younger than the Universe itself.
Guillem Anglada-Escude of Queen Mary University in London stated, “It does make you wonder what kind of life could have evolved on those planets over such a long time.” (1)
Kapteyn’s Star is a small, cool stellar body, called a red dwarf. It is a member of the galactic halo, a collection of stars that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy. The star was first discovered in the late 19th Century, by Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. It can be seen by amateur astronomers in the southern hemisphere, using a small telescope.
Future observations could determine how habitable — or not — Kaptenyn B appears to be for alien life.
