The discovery of the frozen Earth

On January 27, NASA announced the discovery of a frozen land, the term frozen land is because it is almost the same size as the Earth, a little larger. It is still a candidate for an exoplanet, they have to confirm several transits, but it will be complicated, this world has the nice name of HD 137010 b.

The exoplanets have the name of their star, which would be HD 13710 plus a lowercase letter, two or three more observations would be needed to confirm it, at the moment it is believed that it is a rocky planet similar to ours, 6% larger, according to NASA, it orbits a star similar to the sun, is what it says in the statement, but in reality it is an orange dwarf, that is, a star colder and fainter than the sun, our sun is a yellow dwarf.

Regarding the age of this world, the figures are ambiguous, it says that they say it would be between 5,000 million years, keep in mind that it is the age of the planet and also of the star. between 5,000 million years and 10,000 million years. This does not mean that the star is old, because, although the Sun has a life expectancy of about 10 billion years, orange dwarfs can live much longer. An orange lullaby can live peacefully for 20,000 to 40,000 million years and will also increase in brightness and warmth over time.

It is 146 light years from Earth, and it emits enough heat to have a fairly wide habitable zone, not as large as the sun, which is hotter and larger, but that of this star is quite wide, in fact, this star has a year of 355 days, it is similar to that of the Earth and this is the complication that I told you before, that two or three more transits are needed, that is, for the planet to pass in front of the star to be able to characterize more data about the planet and between them the atmosphere it may have to be able to confirm it, its existence and the atmosphere and more data.

Let it pass in front of the star or its star, or rather, you have to wait 355 days. It is the problem of looking for planets similar to the Earth in stars more or less similar to the Sun, which the year they are going to have will also be similar to that of the Earth, so we have to wait 355 days for the next transit, and it will not necessarily happen at the right angle so that we can see it from the Earth. It could pass a little above or a little below the disk of its star, so we would no longer capture it and we would have to wait another 355 days, which is why it is so complicated to discover planets similar to Earth, because it takes time, but little by little some are being found and this one is very interesting.

They call it frozen land, because it would be in the outer zone of the habitable area, but there is controversy, there is debate, currently it is calculated that the surface temperature of this planet could not exceed -68º Celsius, that is, it would be a little colder than Mars, which is around -65º Celsius on average, at the equator it is warmer on Mars, but it would be, as I said, at the outer limit of the habitable zone, since at that temperature it would not be able to maintain liquid water on the surface, although it would be under an icy crust that could have it perfectly, it would be a kind of mega moon Europa.

This habitable zone thing is tricky because the temperature calculation is done based on the energy emitted by the star and the distance at which the planet is located. However, the surface temperature on a planet can vary greatly depending on the density of its atmosphere and the composition of that atmosphere. If it does not have an atmosphere, the temperature would be -68º Celsius, but it would be very rare for a planet of its size and at that distance from its star not to have an atmosphere, because if it were very close to its star, as is the case with Mercury, our Mercury, it can be understood that the solar winds would destroy that atmosphere after 5,000 or 10,000 million years and sweep away the gases from that planet, but this is a world that is much further away from its star than Mercury and its star is not as bright as the sun and it is also quiet.

So, if this new world had an atmosphere that it surely has, with a composition and density similar to that of the Earth, its surface temperature would be -30º Celsius on average, it would still be cold, but with -30º at the Equator it could be fine and if its atmosphere was rich in CO2 or carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas and which is the predominant gas on Mars and which was the predominant gas on the Early Earth, if it were that atmosphere rich in CO2, this new world could even have warm temperatures, it could easily be a world with large oceans, so it is important to be able to characterize what type of atmosphere it has, but for now the term frozen land has stuck, in the style of planet Hot, from the Empire Strikes Back in 1980.

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