Astronomers Discovered a Planet Close to Us With Extremely Long Days and Eternally Lit Night Skies

Astronomers Discovered a Planet Close to Us With Extremely Long Days and Eternally Lit Night Skies
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Little information is known about exoplanets. However, astronomers managed to discover thousands of them already, critical details like the existence of an atmosphere, water, or anything significant or relevant to their possible habitability.

Scientists only seldom discover the sheer size of an exoplanet and how far it orbits from its host star.

A new claim suggests that an exoplanet orbits a star with volcanoes that light up the night sky.

Researchers found no traces of global tectonic activity on planets outside the Solar System we live in until recently.

The discovery was posted recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and it concerns an exoplanet known as LHS 3844b. It orbits a red dwarf star, the most common kind of star in our galaxy, located at approximately 49 light-years, inside the constellation of Indus.

The exoplanet was labelled as a “Super-Earth,” but only barely, as it has a radius 1.3 times bigger than that of Earth and 2.25 times its mass.

A year on the planet lasts for 11 hours. That means that the exoplanet needs only 11 hours to revolve around its orbit star.

Day and night on LHS 3844b take forever. The reason behind that is that the exoplanet is tidally locked to its star, thus showing one side to it, as the Moon does to our planet.

The planet is rocky, full of basalt that makes it look dim, similar to Mercury and the dark Mares on the Moon.

It probably doesn’t have an atmosphere, so that makes it uninhabitable. Even if it had one, the surface temperatures ranging from -250 degrees Celsius to 770 degrees Celsius would not favour life.


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Anna is an avid blogger with an educational background in medicine and mental health. She is a generalist with many other interests including nutrition, women's health, astronomy and photography. In her free time from work and writing, Anna enjoys nature walks, reading, and listening to jazz and classical music.

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