Gillis Lowry / Paul Charles Budassi
The list includes some of the best-known exoplanets, but also others that are less popular. And there are some more promising targets.
There are more than 6,000 exoplanets already discovered. Among them all, a team of astronomers identified 45 rocky exoplanets with potentially life-friendly conditions.
It’s a kind of catalog which aims to help guide future observations in search of biological signals outside the Solar System.
The selected worlds located in the so-called “habitable zone”, the region around a star where temperatures could allow the existence of liquid water on the surface, one of the ingredients considered essential for life as it is known on Earth.
In addition to these 45 main candidates, the team also highlighted 24 planets in a more restrictive version of this habitable zone, based on more conservative assumptions about a planet’s ability to withstand heat without losing habitability, explains .
The list includes some of the exoplanets best known: Proxima Centauri b, TRAPPIST-1f and Kepler-186f; but also others that are less popular, such as TOI-715 b.
According to the authors, some of the most promising These are the planets TRAPPIST-1 d, e, f and g, located about 40 light years from Earth, as well as LHS 1140 b, about 48 light years. Whether these worlds have liquid water will depend, in part, on the existence and stability of an atmosphere.
The researchers paid special attention to planets that receive an amount of stellar energy similar to that which the Earth receives from the Sun. This group includes, for example, TRAPPIST-1 e, TOI-715 b, Kepler-442 b and Proxima Centauri b.
The objective is to understand what are the best candidates for detailed observation with current and future telescopes, including the James Webb, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected in 2027, the Extremely Large Telescope, with first light expected in 2029, and future missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
The catalog It’s not just for searching for extraterrestrial life. The team also wants to better test the limits of planetary habitability, particularly in worlds located at the inner and outer extremes of the habitable zone, or in very elliptical orbits.
These observations could help answer central questions in astrobiology: how much energy is excessive to maintain liquid water, how far a planet can depart from Earth’s conditions and remain habitable, and where, after all, the narrow cosmic band in which life can survive ends.
