"Meet TOI-700's exoplanets: Our best bet for alien life." TOI-700, discovered by the ongoing TESS mission, is known to have at least two potentially inhabited, Earth-sized worlds around it.
"The ideal candidate for discovering a potentially inhabited exoplanet should correspond to the following properties: it should be rocky, with a thin atmosphere, similar in size to Earth, but not much larger, around a star with a stable, continuous energy output, at a distance conducive to the presence of liquid water on its surface, with a similar abundance of heavy elements to our own Solar System, where enough time has passed so that life has had a transformative impact on the planet's biosphere, and where it's close enough so that near-future technology could reveal those relevant, key biosignatures."
"Although TOI-700 is an M-class star -- a red dwarf -- it's one of the more massive red dwarfs out there, with more than 40% the mass of the Sun." "It has never been seen to flare, has negligible sunspot activity, and indicates that the star has been around for a while: at least 1.5 billion years already. Additionally, it has almost an identical heavy element content to our Sun."
Meet TOI-700's exoplanets: Our best bet for alien life
#discoveries #astronomy #exoplanets #tess
