They've found a new planet that looks a lot like our own, and it's so close to us that you could see its star from your backyard with a cheap 10-inch telescope.

Today a team of astronomers led by Zach Berta-Thompson, an exoplanet researcher at MIT, has announced the discovery of the closest Earth-sized rocky exoplanet by far. The new planet, temporarily named GJ 1132b, is only 12 parsecs away. That's roughly 39 light years (or one Kessel Run, if you're Han Solo), and three times closer than the next nearest Earth-sized planet. It's so close that if its star were as luminous as our own Sun, "it'd be quite bright in the night's sky to our naked eye," says Berta-Thompson. The finding is published in the journal Nature.

According to Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research, the new exoplanet "is arguably the most important planet ever found outside the Solar System," he writes in an accompanying Nature essay.

The MEarth-South telescope array, located on Cerro Tololo in Chile, searches for planets by monitoring the brightness of nearby, small stars. This long-exposure photograph shows MEarth-South telescopes observing at night; the blurred telescope is slewing Jonathan Irwin

GJ 1132b closely orbits a red dwarf, the galaxy's most common kind of star, and it's too hot for liquid water or Earth-like life. The reason that Deming and other astronomers are so excited about the new exoplanet, then, is not because it could harbor life or even one day become a colony site for future humans. They're excited because GJ 1132b's proximity will allow scientists to directly view and investigate the planet and its atmosphere—a first for an Earth-sized outside our solar system. As you read this, the scientists are already attempting to use the trusty Hubble telescope to spy on the planet. And when the NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) launches in 2017, the new exoplanet is likely to be among the first to be investigated.

Berta-Thompson and his colleagues discovered GJ 1132b with entirely different equipment than the Kepler telescope, which scientists have used in the past five years to find more than a thousand exoplanets in a very small, extremely distant patch of the sky. Rather, Berta-Thompson used 8 ground-based telescopes in Chile, called the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (or CITO), to track nearby stars. Like Kepler, CITO discovers exoplanets by watching a star's light dim as a planet passes in front of it. That kind of information can tell you a planet's size, density, and orbit—but little else.

"From this we know there's a lot of similarities between GJ 1132b and Earth, in terms of size and density. It's only about 16 percent larger than the radius of the Earth," says Berta-Thompson. The planet has an Earth-like density assumed to be largely rocky with an iron core. But GJ 1132b whips around its cool, small star in a year that's only about one and a half Earth days long.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Unlike the planets in the recent deluges of Kepler data—whose potential for follow-up are vague and years off in the future— GJ 1132b is uniquely suited for immediate investigation. It's not just that the new planet is close to use. Berta-Thompson says the relative coolness of its parent star means that our satellites aren't overly blinded with background noise when trying to glimpse it. That makes painting a clear picture of GJ 1132b's atmosphere much easier.

Right now, based on our best planetary models, the researchers believe GJ 1132b could have a thick oxygen-rich and hydrogen-poor atmosphere. Whether or not that estimate matches up to what we'll really find on GJ 1132b could radically upend (or refine) our understanding of how Earth-sized rocky worlds form. "Mostly, I'm excited about the prospect this planet brings for understanding the diversity of terrestrial worlds," says Berta-Thompson.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io