Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable new planet which is estimated to be 6 percent larger than Earth.
Named HD 137010 b, the planet is located about 146 light-away from Earth and possesses conditions similar to Mars.
The candidate planet which orbits a sun-like star was identified by the team of researchers from the UK, the US, Australia, and Denmark.
The international team utilized data collected in 2017 by the NASA Kepler space telescope’s extended mission, known as K2, to unlock this breakthrough.
According to researchers, the planet has “about a 50 percent chance of residing in the habitable zone” of a sun-like star it orbits.
HD 137010 b harbours Mars-like conditions because its orbiting stars are relatively cooler and dimmer than our sun. As per their observations, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the temperature at the planet could be potentially below -70C.
Dr Chelsea Huang, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, said the planet has an orbit similar to Earth’s orbit, which is of around 355 days.
“What’s very exciting about this particular Earth-sized planet is that its star is only [about] 150 light-years away from our solar system,” Huang said.
Talking about the discovery's importance, Huang said, "The team’s first reaction to the discovery was that this cannot possibly be true. But we double checked and triple checked everything and … it’s a textbook example of a transit of a planet.”
Dr Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University, shed light on the “exciting” nature of discovery, but comprehensive research is further needed to categorize the possible candidate as an exoplanet.
Webb said, “There is only one transit [detected], and typically in planetary science we’re talking a gold standard of three [detections].”
Acknowledging the Earth-like planet’s features as one exciting possibility, Webb continued, “it could also be something called a super snowball. Essentially, a big, icy world that potentially has a lot of water, but a lot of it’s frozen.”