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Mysterious yet fascinating defines the discovery of another planet, living in a galaxy far, far away from our own. An astronomer from the University of British Columbia is a key player in the exploration of a newly found “super-Earth," and he says it might be made up of mostly water.
UBC professor and mission scientist with Canada's first space telescope, Jaymie Matthews, has confirmed the existence of a new planet 180 light years away from Earth. Classified as “super-Earth,” this planet is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and 12 times its mass.
Photo credit: UBC News.
Officially coined HIP 116454 b, this new planet follows a similar nine-day orbit around a star. The planet's orbit path lies within close proximity to its sun, making the planet too hot to host life as we know it here on earth.
“It could be a miniature version of the ice giant planet Neptune,” said Matthews. “An even more exciting possibility is that it’s three-quarters water."
Backed by a team of researchers, Matthew assisted American scientists in confirming the alleged hint of a new planet in the great beyond, according to UBC.
The initial spark surrounding the planet was first lit by NASA. A team of researchers analyzed data gathered from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. After catching a glimpse of what they assumed was HIP 116454 b, researchers lost track of the planet before they were able to confirm its status.
Photo credit: NASA.
Matthews and his research team led the Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars, an American based research committee, in the right direction of the new planet. After confirming the planet's existence, researchers set to explore the unknown alien.
“This particular planet’s calendar wouldn’t take many pages,” said Matthews. “It orbits its sun every 9.1 days. That’s the length of a year on HIP 116454 b.”
Although the planet is too close to the sun to sustain life, Matthews is hopeful that other planets in the solar system surrounding the sun may be a different story.
“This Super-Earth may have neighbours, and one might be in the star’s habitable zone. Only time and careful study of this system will tell,” added Matthews.
The original NASA mission, K2, was searching the cosmos for other worlds when they caught first caught a glimpse of the new planet.
"The Kepler mission showed us that planets larger in size than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common in the galaxy, yet they are absent in our solar system," said Steve Howell, Kepler/K2 project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "K2 is uniquely positioned to dramatically refine our understanding of these alien worlds and further define the boundary between rocky worlds like Earth and ice giants like Neptune."
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