Earth-like planet may exist in nearby star system Gliese 832 at a distance of 16 light-years, predict scientists

An Earth-like planet may exist near a star system Gliese 832, according to the recent research published in The Astrophysical Journal. Scientists also predicted that hypothetical alien world is just 16 light-years away from the star system.

Astrophysicists at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in the US investigated the star system Gliese 832 for additional exoplanets residing between the two currently known alien worlds in this system.

Gliese 832 is a red dwarf extrasolar planet located approximately 16 light-years away in the constellation of Grus, orbiting the star Gliese 832. The planet has an Earth Similarity Index of 0.81. Gliese 832 c has a mass of approximately 5.2 times that of Earth

Their computations revealed that an additional Earth-like planet with a dynamically stable configuration may be residing at a distance ranging from 0.25 to 2.0 astronomical unit (AU) from the star.

The hypothetical alien world would have a mass between 1 to 15 Earth masses.

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The gas giant with 0.64 Jupiter masses is orbiting the star at a distance of 3.53 AU, while the other planet is potentially a rocky world, around five times more massive than the Earth, residing very close its host star - about 0.16 AU.

This result will definitely be the biggest breakthrough revealing the possible existence of a new planet near to star system.

"The fact that Dr Satyal was able to demonstrate that the planet could maintain a stable orbit in the habitable zone of a red dwarf for more than one billion years is extremely impressive," Weiss said.

The team analyzed the simulated data with an infected Earth-mass planet on this nearby planetary system hoping to find a stable orbital configuration for the planet that may be located in a vast space between the two known planets. Gliese 832b and Gliese 832c were discovered by the radial velocity technique, which detects variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull from an unseen exoplanet as it orbits the star.

By regularly looking at the spectrum of a star - and so, measuring its velocity - one can see if it moves periodically due to the influence of a companion. "We also used the integrated data from the time evolution of orbital parameters to generate the synthetic radial velocity curves of the known and the Earth-like planets in the system," said Satyal. "We obtained several radial velocity curves for varyingmasses and distances indicating a possible new middle planet," he said.

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