After spotting the silhouette of an Earth-like exoplanet with a ground-based telescope, a team of astronomers believes they can make more similar observations in the same manner.
According to the Guardian, the 55 Cancri e "Super Earth" passed in front of its host star, from which it is not far from, and blocked a tiny bit of its light. The planet is twice the diameter of the Earth and is about 41 light years away.
Because the observation was made with a ground-based telescope, the astronomers believe they could spot more potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets.
"Our observations show that we can detect the transits of small planets around Sun-like stars using ground-based telescopes," study lead-author Ernst de Mooij, of Queen's University Belfast, said in a press release. "This is especially important because upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO should find many small planets around bright stars and we will want to follow up the discoveries with ground-based instruments."
Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) plan to launch probes to search space for potentially habitable exoplanets. NASA is planning to launch the TESS spacecraft in 2017 and the ESA will send PLATO on its way in 2024.
"With this result we are also closing in on the detection of the atmospheres of small planets with ground-based telescopes," study co-author Mercedes Lopez-Morales, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in the release. "We are slowly paving the way toward the detection of bio-signatures in Earth-like planets around nearby stars."
55 Cancri e is not potentially habitable, as it orbits its host too close, resulting in a surface temperature of 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit.
"We expect these surveys to find so many nearby, terrestrial worlds that space telescopes simply won't be able to follow up on all of them," Lopez-Morales said. "Future ground-based instrumentation will be key, and this study shows it can be done."
