Super-Earth Seems Lovely Until You Look Up

What if Earth was bigger? The so-called “Super-Earth” is a rocky world like ours but is several times larger. It could offer us a new home if we were to leave the solar system. Some of the scientists discovered super-Earths are too far away from their star to be warm enough for liquid water, hence it is a no-go. Some of them are within or near the habitable zone. It is great news for us, but the vast majority of those are too distant to consider visiting at present.

A newly discovered Super-Earth, near the GJ-740, is special for us because it is near Earth. It is only 36 light-years away, but there is another problem, which is the heat. It is entirely hot. The planet is estimated to be massive and around 3 times Earth’s size. The sizeable chunk of rock is orbiting around a cooler star than our Sun.

GJ-740 is a red dwarf which means that the peak temperature is thousands of degrees cooler than our Sun. However, the planet is very close to its star, canceling most of the benefits orbiting a cooler star. Earth takes 365 days to complete an orbit around the Sun. The newly discovered Super-Earth, a day is very short. The planet completes a full year in a mere amount of 2.4 Earth days. This indicates how close the planet is to its star.

As a result of the closeness, the star is absorbing a huge amount of the star’s radiation in form of heat and other wavelengths of light.