This will be a job for powerful new telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, due to be launched next year, or giant ground-based telescopes like the Giant Magellan<br />and European Extremely Large telescopes, now being built in Chile, Dr. Charbonneau said.<br />His colleague Jason Dittmann, who led the discovery team<br />and is lead author of a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, said in a statement,“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the last decade.”<br />The planet was discovered by the MEarth-South survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, an array of small telescopes<br />that looks for the dips in starlight when planets pass in front of nearby stars.<br />“This planet is really close to us: If we shrank the Milky Way to the size of the United States, LHS 1140<br />and the sun would fit inside Central Park,” David Charbonneau, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in an email.<br />A New Exoplanet May Be Most Promising Yet in Search for Life -<br />By DENNIS OVERBYEAPRIL 19, 2017<br />A prime planet listing has just appeared on the cosmic real estate market, possibly the most promising<br />place yet to search for signs of life beyond the solar system, the astronomers who discovered it say.<br />According to Dr. Charbonneau, who originated the MEarth system, red dwarf stars outnumber stars like<br />our sun by about 10 to 1 in the 30-light-year bubble that constitutes our “block” in the cosmos.<br />This discovery continues a recent run of promising new planets circling nearby dwarf stars.
