Nearby Earth-sized world may be the best candidate yet in the search for alien life
Another tantalizing planet has been found outside our Solar System: an Earth-sized world that’s our cosmic next-door neighbor — and it could be in just the right spot to host life.
Meet Ross 128 b, a newly discovered planet found orbiting around a small, faint star known as a red dwarf. The world, which is about one-and-a-half times the mass of Earth, may be in the star’s habitable zone, too. (That’s the spot where temperatures are just right, possibly allowing liquid water to pool on a planet’s surface.) Most exciting of all is that this planet is situated just 11 light-years away. That makes Ross 128 b the second closest potentially habitable exoplanet to Earth we know about after Proxima b, a rocky world that orbits around the…
