Space

Newly Discovered Exoplanets Identified As 'Hot Earth'

Alex Davis
First Posted: Oct 13, 2016 05:21 AM EDT

As NASA continues to study on what is happening outside the Earth, they encountered a lot of new discoveries. Perhaps, some planets are habitable by humans, but as of now this cannot be proven. As they keep on investigating the mystery of the outer space, they came across 24 exoplanets and identified it as "Hot Earth."

A huge team of experts coming from NASA Ames Research Center, University of Nevada, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute come together and studied star system where the planets are isolated from other planets and labelled it as "hot Earth" 24 of those has been identified.

The scientists define on how they come up with the large set of possible star system candidates and trim it down to two dozen by focusing on those that were not in close proximity to other planets. Their research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hot Earth is interesting because they are Earth-sized planets that exist close to their stars. Scientists say that it is unlikely to support life because most of the exoplanets do not rotate. For example, as Earth rotates it gives us night and day, in the case of exoplanets one side that faces the sun would be too hot and the other side that faces the moon would be too cold.

To further their discovery,  researchers conducted a new study for them to cancel out other exoplanets and to know which planets would be the hot Earth. It shows that the exoplanets orbits so close to their stars that it would take only two days to make the trip. The study started from the part of the sky that was captured by Kepler that had over 3000 known candidates, they sifted it out and ended up with 144 planets.

Researchers then excluded systems that have one planet and the number reduced to 24 including those that has hot Earth. Filtering of the exoplanets led them to an estimate that more or less every six hot Earth do not have a nearby companion. The scientists acknowledge the possibility that the solitary hot Earth they found do have companions, but the Kepler's line is out of sight, according to Phys.Org.

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