Discovery of super-cold ice planet with Earth-like mass

NASA astronomers have discovered an extremely cold planet with a mass similar to Earth and orbiting its parent star at a similar distance as Earth orbits the Sun.

OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is almost devoid of life due to its extreme cold. Photo: NASA.

The newly discovered planet, called OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb, is located nearly 13,000 light-years from Earth. The planet orbits a star so small that scientists are not sure it is actually a star, Sci Tech Daily reported.

They say it could be a brown dwarf, a star-like object whose core is not hot enough to generate energy through nuclear fusion. This particular star has a mass just 7.8% that of the Sun. It could also be an ultra-cool dwarf like Trappist-1, a star system that contains seven Earth-sized planets.

According to the research team, OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is unlikely to support life because the planet is extremely cold, even colder than Pluto in the Solar System, to the point that water on its surface would freeze if it existed.

Scientists found the planet using a technique called microlensing. "This icy sphere is the lowest-mass planet discovered using microlensing," Yossi Shvartzvald, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a report published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The discovery of OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb will help scientists better understand the distribution of planets in the Milky Way.

According to VNE