January 17, 2020

Artist's concept of the GJ180 system (Image Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series” reports the identification of five new exoplanets, the detection of eight exoplanet candidates that will be verified, and the confirmation of three exoplanets previously detected but not yet confirmed. A team of astronomers led by Fabo Feng and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science selected and reanalyzed data gathered in the survey conducted with the UVES instrument mounted on ESO’s VLT using other verification instruments. Two of the new exoplanets are super-Earths in their system’s habitable zone, the first of this type that orbit around red dwarfs not tidally locked,, a positive factor because having always day on one face and always night on the other generates extreme temperatures that lower the chances of life being born.