Wolf 1061c: closest planet found orbiting in a star’s habitable zone 14 light years from Earth
A team of Australian scientists has found the closest potentially habitable planet orbiting a star just 14 light years away.
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> a red dwarf “M-type” star.
I don’t like combining “M-type” star with “habitable zone”. Class M stars are known to exhibit massive (relatively) flare-ups associated with huge sunspots. Nasty stuff for any planet near the star.
> The three newly detected planets orbit the small, relatively cool and stable star about every five, 18 and 67 days. Their masses are at minimum 1.4, 4.3 and 5.2 times that of Earth, respectively.
In other exoplanet news. http://wasp-planets.net/
The atmosphere of many hot Jupiters has now been studied using spectra from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes. All have atmospheres containing water (good) and all have atmospheres containing sodium and potassium (bad).
mollwollfumble said:
> a red dwarf “M-type” star.I don’t like combining “M-type” star with “habitable zone”. Class M stars are known to exhibit massive (relatively) flare-ups associated with huge sunspots. Nasty stuff for any planet near the star.
> The three newly detected planets orbit the small, relatively cool and stable star about every five, 18 and 67 days. Their masses are at minimum 1.4, 4.3 and 5.2 times that of Earth, respectively.
In addition, because this was found by the transit method rather than by Doppler or direct observation, there’s no information on eccentricity.
mollwollfumble said:
> a red dwarf “M-type” star.I don’t like combining “M-type” star with “habitable zone”. Class M stars are known to exhibit massive (relatively) flare-ups associated with huge sunspots. Nasty stuff for any planet near the star.
> The three newly detected planets orbit the small, relatively cool and stable star about every five, 18 and 67 days. Their masses are at minimum 1.4, 4.3 and 5.2 times that of Earth, respectively.
In addition, because this was found by the transit method rather than by Doppler or direct observation, there’s no information on eccentricity.
See also:http://www.stsci.edu/~inr/thisweek1/2015/thisweek222.html
“M dwarfs – at least, the subset of M dwarfs known as flare stars – are renowned for possessing extremely active chromospheres and coronae. Their discovery as highly variable objects happened largely by chance. Willem Luyten had noticed in 1924 that certain M dwarfs showed spectroscopic variability, with the occasional appearance of emission lines, while in the early 1940s van Maanen commented that two late-type dwarfs, Gl 412B (WX UMa) and Gl 285 (YZ CMi), had brightened by over a magnitude on a handful of parallax plates. The crucial observations came in 1948, when E.F Carpenter noticed that the fainter component of a wide binary system had brightened by more than 3 magnitudes in a matter of minutes. In the succeeding 50 years, these stars have been subjected to extensive observations, particularly at optical and X-ray wavelengths, and the underlying physical processes are relatively well understood. However, most attention has focused on the more active flare stars, and we still have a relatively uncertain grasp on the flare frequency among less active stars. This issue has acquired increased importance with the realisation that somewhere between 10 and 50% of M dwarfs host planetary systems. As the most populous stars in the Galaxy, this also makes M dwarfs the premier planet hosts. The habitable zones in those systems lie much closer to the parent star, and planets are correspondingly vulnerable to detrimental effects from enhanced UV radiation, particularly short-wavelength UV-C. This proposal uses the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph to obtain UV and optical spectra (1150-5700 Angstroms) of nearby M dwarfs, providing a broad sampling of the range of activity levels among these low mass dwarfs.”