This will be a job for powerful new telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched next year, or giant ground-based telescopes like the Giant Magellan
and European Extremely Large telescopes, now being built in Chile, Dr. Charbonneau said.
His colleague Jason Dittmann, who led the discovery team
and is lead author of a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, said in a statement,“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the last decade.”
The planet was discovered by the MEarth-South survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, an array of small telescopes
that looks for the dips in starlight when planets pass in front of nearby stars.
“This planet is really close to us: If we shrank the Milky Way to the size of the United States, LHS 1140
and the sun would fit inside Central Park,” David Charbonneau, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in an email.
A New Exoplanet May Be Most Promising Yet in Search for Life -
By DENNIS OVERBYEAPRIL 19, 2017
A prime planet listing has just appeared on the cosmic real estate market, possibly the most promising
place yet to search for signs of life beyond the solar system, the astronomers who discovered it say.
According to Dr. Charbonneau, who originated the MEarth system, red dwarf stars outnumber stars like
our sun by about 10 to 1 in the 30-light-year bubble that constitutes our “block” in the cosmos.
This discovery continues a recent run of promising new planets circling nearby dwarf stars.