A newly identified exoplanet, considered potentially habitable by scientists, is being described as one of Earth’s closest cosmic neighbors — and it may become an important target in the ongoing search for life beyond our solar system.
“This one’s exciting,” Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement Tuesday, noting that the world is “one of our closest cosmic neighbors.”
Robertson, lead author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, put that distance into perspective: “Twenty-five light years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor.”
The planet, known as GJ 3378b, is estimated to be about twice the size of Earth. It also lies within its star’s so-called Goldilocks zone — the region where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface.
Still, its potential to support life depends heavily on whether it has managed to hold on to an atmosphere. Scientists say GJ 3378b is positioned near the edge of the “cosmic shoreline,” a measure used to assess whether a planet’s gravity can retain an atmosphere despite the radiation it receives from its star.
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Robertson illustrated the delicate nature of that protective layer with a familiar comparison: “If you scale the Earth down to the size of an apple, its atmosphere would be about as thick as the skin of the apple.”
“That’s just enough to maintain the kinds of surface pressures where you can have liquid water,” he explained.
He added that such an atmosphere is also “enough that there’ll be breathable air,” while offering at least some protection from the harsh radiation of space.
More observatories are required to determine if a given planet has any kind of atmosphere, which could “justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water or other signs of life that require both an atmosphere and the right amount of heating from the host star,” said Gogod James, a UC Irvine student in Robertson’s group who helped study the size of GJ 3378b.
NASA has plans to construct the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is slated to launch in the next 20 years or so.
If completed, astronomers will begin to search for chemicals in atmospheres that could have been produced by life.
“I think that’s just too much fun,” said Robertson.
