Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, May 21 (Xinhua)-- using data from the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the retired Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA has discovered a new planet the size of Earth that may be full of volcanoes. For the study, published in the journal Nature, the researchers named the planet LP 791d.

Co-author Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal in Canada said: "the planet is tidal locked, which means it is always facing its star in the same way. Its daytime surface may be too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface. But we suspect that a large amount of volcanic activity on the planet may have formed an atmosphere, which may have caused the water to condense at night."

LP 79118d orbits a red dwarf star about 90 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Guardian, NASA said.

"an important question in astrobiology is whether crustal tectonic activity or volcanic activity is needed to have life," said Jesse Kristiansen, a NASA research scientist. "in addition to providing an atmosphere, these processes can stir substances that would have sunk into the earth's crust and trapped, including substances that we think are important to life, such as carbon."

CTOnews.com Note:

The transit exoplanet survey satellite is one of NASA's astrophysics explorer missions, led and operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Spitzer's observations of the planetary system are one of the last to be made before retirement in January 2020. All scientific data collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope during its life cycle can be made available to the public through the Spitzer data archive at the Infrared Science Archive in Pasadena, Caltech.

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