(Credit: M. Weiss/CfA) A new, nearby exoplanet could be just the boilerplate needed to find out if life could exist in untold numbers of star systems. The planet, LHS 1140b, is 39 light years away. It orbits a small M-dwarf star every 24 days. The planet itself is 1.4 times larger and 6.6 times more massive than Earth, and the principal investigators of the study published today in Nature believe it to be rocky.
Our list of exoplanets is long — nearly 3,500 strong, with new planets coming every week. But the list of potentially habitable exoplanets is much shorter, topping out around a dozen. Most on that list are around M-dwarfs like LHS 1140. That’s because they’re the most abundant stars in the galaxy and some of the easier stars to capture transit signals from. A planet is considered habitable when it’s in an area where liquid water might ...
