Scientists have found the lost planet. Conditions on it are close to the habitable zone

Planet NGTS-11b orbits a star at a distance of 620 light years and is located five times closer to its

star than the Earth to the Sun. NGTS-11b was originally discovered in a planet search in 2018 using data from NASA's TESS telescope.

This search uses the transit method forPlanet Detection, which scans the sky for a telltale incidence of light from a star. He who indicates that the object has passed between the telescope and the star. TESS scans only most areas of the sky for 27 days. This means that many of the longer period planets enter the TESS database only once.

And without a second observation, the planet actuallyis lost. A team led by the University of Warwick tracked one of these "lost" planets using telescopes at the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) in Chile and observed the star for seventy-nine nights. In the end, astronomers caught the planet in transit, this happened only a year after the first detection.

As a result, scientists have found a planet with a longerperiod of revolution around its orbit. Such discoveries are rare, but important because they allow scientists to study planets with extended orbital periods. These planets are colder and larger than the planets in our solar system. NGTS-11b has a temperature of only 160 ° C - colder than that of Mercury and Venus. While it's still too high a temperature to support life as we know it, the conditions are close to the habitable zone, emphasizes Dr. Samuel Gill of the University of Warwick's physics department. Especially when comparing NGTS-11b to many previously discovered planets. They usually have temperatures above 1000 ° C.

The habitable zone refers to the range of orbits,which would allow a planet or moon to support liquid water: too close to its star and it will be too hot, but too far away and the water will become too cold.

In the future, TESS will find hundreds oftransits that scientists will control using the new method. This will allow researchers to spot cooler exoplanets of all sizes. Even including planets more similar to those in our own solar system. Some will be small rocky planets in the habitable zone that are cool enough to house liquid oceans and potentially extraterrestrial life.

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