Swiss researchers discover special exoplanet
Keystone-SDA
An international research team with Swiss participation has discovered an exoplanet with a special property. According to the University of Geneva, the planet allows new hypotheses about extraterrestrial life to be tested.
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The planet with the name HD 20794 d oscillates between the habitable and non-habitable zone on its elliptical orbit around its sun, the University of Geneva said on Tuesday. The habitable zone is the area around a star in which liquid water could theoretically exist. Evidence of the discovery was published on Tuesday in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
According to the university, this configuration is particularly interesting for astronomers to test hypotheses about the habitability of a planet.
+ Swiss space telescope observes exoplanet ‘rainbow’
HD 20794 d is a so-called super-Earth, i.e. a rocky planet that is larger than the Earth. It is part of a solar system 19.7 light years away from us that contains two other planets. Astronomers consider this distance to be close. The University of Geneva said this proximity makes it easier to study the planet.
Result of 20 years of research
According to the University of Geneva, the discovery of the exoplanet was made possible by data collected with various telescopes over the past 20 years.
Exoplanets are planets that exist outside our solar system and orbit around other stars. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995, for which Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019, astronomers have discovered more than 7,000 exoplanets.
+ Thousands of planets – but is there life out there?
Translated from German by DeepL/ts
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