The known exoplanets are something of a grab bag—some large, some small, some hot, some cold, some gaseous like Jupiter and Neptune, some rocky like Earth and Mars. For astronomers looking for extraterrestrial life, the true jackpot planet would be Earth-like: smallish and rocky, with an atmosphere, orbiting its parent star in the so-called habitable zone, that sweet thermal spot that is not too hot and not too cold, allowing water to exist in liquid form. In the 34 years exoplanets have been studied, no world that checks all of those boxes has ever been spotted—until now.
A living world, says planetary scientist Collin Cherubim of the University of Chicago, lead author of the new paper, “has got to be the right temperature to sustain liquid water on the surface, and it has to have an atmosphere to hold that water in place and to shield the surface from ionizing radiation. LHS 1140b has all three of these things. That puts it at the forefront for studying astrobiology and habitability and looking for life outside the solar system.”
The star LHS 1140b orbits is known as a red dwarf, a relatively small, relatively cool body with surface temperatures of 3,100°F to 5,800°F, compared to the 10,000°F heat of our own sun. About three out of every four stars in our galaxy are thought to be red dwarfs. For a planet orbiting a red dwarf to stay warm enough to sustain liquid water—and potentially life—it has to snuggle up close to the solar fires, and LHS 1140b does that, orbiting about 9 million miles from its star, about a tenth of the 93 million-mile-distance the Earth maintains from the sun. The planet is about 1.7 times the diameter of Earth and, thanks to additional calculations using the radial-velocity method, was determined to be 5.6 times our mass. It orbits its star once every 24.7 days compared to Earth’s one-year period.
What do we know about the atmosphere on planet LHS 1140b?
Cherubim and his team next checked that prediction, making direct observations of the planet using the transit method. “When the planet passes in front of the star, some of that starlight filters through the atmosphere of the planet,” Cherubim says. “If there are any molecules or atoms like helium in the planet's atmosphere, they can absorb or block very specific wavelengths of light.” Those absorption markers were present, proving that LHS 1140b indeed had a helium bleed.
“My models do predict carbon dioxide to be the second most abundant gas, and carbon monoxide to be present, and also small amounts of O2 molecular oxygen,” says Cherubim. “From our climate modeling, we've also predicted a lot of water on this planet.” All of that, especially the water, indeed represents the basic recipe list if you’re looking to bake a biological cake.
What is the star like that planet LHS 1140b orbits?
“Right now on LHS 1140B, the amount of X-ray flux would not really be threatening to life as we know it at all,” says Cherubim.
None of that means life is actually present on LHS 1140b—or perhaps even possible given the countless chemical and thermal things that have to go right for biology to emerge. But the study does provide some tantalizing promise. There are trillions of planets at large in a universe fairly awash in organic chemistry. The odds favor at least some of them having conditions similar to that of the early Earth—including a protective atmosphere. If life could emerge here, there is no reason it couldn’t out there too.
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