Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be conducive to life's emergence.
That information isn't available to us yet, but the world represents a promising candidate for a future search for biosignatures on nearby, Earth-mass exoplanets.
The search for exoplanets – that is, extrasolar planets, those outside our Solar System – is hobbled by the limitations of our current technology. Make no mistake, that technology is amazing; but our primary methods for finding exoplanets are way better at finding large worlds than small ones.
That's because they rely on indirect signs, the effects an exoplanet has on its host star. The transit method detects the very faint, regular dips in starlight as an exoplanet orbits between us and its star; and the radial velocity method detects minute changes in wavelength of light as the star is very, very slightly moved around on the spot by the gravitational interaction with the exoplanet.
So, while more than 5,200 exoplanets have been confirmed at time of writing, fewer than 1.5 percent of those have masses below that of two Earths.
Astronomers Find What May Be a Habitable World 31 Light-Years Away
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