From what the planets are like, to whether they could be places to find life, join me as we explore how Teegarden B Has Highest Possibility Of Alien Life!
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Very recently (like found in 2019 recently), observers from CARMENES (who are a team looking for Class-M planets for us to habitate) found two Earth-like planets just 12.5 lightyears from planet Earth.Granted, that’s still pretty far and it’d still take us a long time to travel there, but 12 lightyears is much closer than the 45,000 light years and beyond of certain other “Earth-like planets” that have ben found. Not to mention, these two planets feel like ones that could have both the necessary water and land for us to live on:
“The two planets resemble the inner planets of our solar system,” lead author Mathias Zechmeister, a research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, said in a statement. “They are only slightly heavier than Earth and are located in the so-called habitable zone, where water can be present in liquid form.”
Research has obviously just begun on these two stars, but there is hope that they could be the real deal. For example, usually the fact that this is a red dwarf star (called Teegarden) would be a red-flag, as they don’t produce as much heat and light. But, the two planets are actually closer to the sun, so that actually would work in our favor.
The only truly “weird” thing about these planets is the orbits around their sun. It takes them between 1-2 weeks to do it, even less than that in fact. That’s massively quick. But, if you think about it, time is only a construct, so what would really matter is how those quick orbits help or hinder the landscape.
Even if these two twins aren’t perfectly suitable, the team at CARMENES are hopeful that other Earth-like planets could be as close as they are, and possibly in the same system as them.
But for now, let’s focus on Teegarden B, and talk about why certain people think that this is the planet that has the highest probability of being a place where alien life can be found.
Obviously, the biggest hurdle has been cleared in that the planet in is in the habitable zone of its star Teegarden. You’d be surprised by how many “potential Earths” are out there, but few of them are in a good range from their sun, which makes them either too hot or too cold, and when you’re trying to pick a planet to live on…you don’t go to a planet of extremes unless you’re in an EXTREME emergency, am I right?
Anyway, on the planet Teegarden B, you’ll find that the temperature is a suitable 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit on average. Which means it’s a semi-hot planet, but trust me when I say you’d rather have a “Summer Day” on another planet than a freezing one or one that is so hot your skin will melt.
Furthermore, as outlined earlier, there is a VERY good chance that Teegarden B has water. But not just water, oceans! A LOT of scientists feel that the oceans of Teegarden B are not unlike what we have here on Earth, and if that’s true that could be an even bigger sign that there is life on the planet. Not to mention, if there is land masses on there and not just a water world (which hasn’t been confirmed as of yet but is likely) that would mean that it could be a near copy of Earth with just different proportions of water and land.
But all of this would be moot if the star known as Teegarden wasn’t one to “cooperate” with the planet. What do I mean by that? Think about our own sun. Because of the distance to our star (93 million miles in total) we don’t get the brunt of the heat or the light or the radiation that it produces. We get just enough of it, and our atmosphere and magnetosphere deflects or absorbs all the other things that could potentially hurt us if we were to get it full blast.
There are many stars in the universe, and many of them have Earth-like planets surrounding them, including ones we truly believe could be the future home of humanity. The problem is that most times the stars do things like solar flares, massive bursts of energy and radiation that can destroy an atmosphere and cause untold damage to the surface of the planet that we’re trying to inhabit.
But in the case of Teegarden…despite it being a Red Dwarf star…it doesn’t act up at all. In fact, it’s been known to be a rather inactive and quiet star. Which is great, because given the distance of Teegarden to Teegarden B (which is much closer than the distance from the Earth to the sun), if flares were to happen, the planet would be ravaged by it. But since that’s not the case, it appears as though, Teegarden B really does have the best case scenario to produce life.
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