Just How Similar Are These New Found Planets to Jupiter and Neptune?

Amaze Lab

Finding a world like Earth elsewhere in the universe might mean looking for the right kind of solar system. A new discovery sheds light on what composition of planets might be necessary to support life.

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00:00ever wondered exactly what it would take for life to exist on some other planet in the universe

00:09an earth-like world is only the beginning scientists believe a solar system like ours

00:15with its particular makeup of planets and other rocky bodies is also vitally important science

00:21alert reports the discovery of a pair of worlds around a star eerily similar to our own sun

00:28could be the closest we've come to finding such a system even if it's 175 light years away

00:36astronomers peering through the european southern observatory's lucilla telescope identified two gas

00:42giants in its orbit one a jupiter analog and the other a super neptune weighing around 43 earths

00:51both in the optimistic habitable zone a distance from their host star that is just within a habitable

00:58temperature the star hip 104045 is a dead ringer for our own sun in terms of age mass radius and

01:08luminosity though the super neptune orbits a little too close for comfort it's not impossible that a

01:15small rocky world brimming with alien life could be hiding nearby within our solar system scientists

01:22believe jupiter plays an important role by shielding us from rocky bombardment it may have also been

01:28instrumental in helping other rocks reach earth during its early formation delivering ingredients

01:34essential for life the findings submitted to the monthly notices of the royal astronomical society

01:41give scientists a better understanding of the compositions of planetary systems necessary to

01:46support life so far we're like nothing else in the known universe the only one of our kind

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