Astronomers have discovered a rocky planet that is orbiting a small star that has many similarities to Earth and Venus.

Back in May, a team of researchers using the MEarth-South telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile identified the the exoplanet named GJ 1132b that is only about 39 light-years away, making it the closest exoplanet that has yet to be discovered.

Published recently in the journal Nature, astrophysicists from MIT and other astronomers found that GJ 1132b is only 1.2 times the size of the Earth, has a mass about 1.6 times that of the Earth, and orbits a parent star. It takes 1.6 days for it take make a single trip around the red dwarf Gliese 1132.

Just like the moon's tides are locked to our planet, the Earth-sized exoplanet also is tidally locked, which simply means it has a day and a night side, depending on which side is facing its star while in orbit.

There is no denying GJ 1132b's similarities to the Earth, but it can actually pass as a cousin to another planet in our solar system, Venus.

The planet orbits very close it its parent star, giving it a surface temperature much hotter than Earth's at about 440 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth, but along the way we've found a twin Venus," astronomer David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a statement. "We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere, too, and if it does we can't wait to get a whiff."

While GJ 1132b is even hotter than Venus, researchers will be able to use telescopes to measure the amount of light that passes through the GJ 1132b's atmosphere, which can then be analyzed for atmospheric gases like oxygen that could give clues the alien life.

But don't get too excited because the planet is even hotter than Venus, and is too close to its star for it to contain liquid water.

"The temperature of the planet is about as hot as your oven will go, so it's like burnt-cookie hot," said Zachory Berta-Thompson, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "It's too hot to be habitable—there's no way there's liquid water on the surface. But it is a lot cooler than the other rocky planets that we know of."

Researchers will conduct an in-depth study of the exoplanet that has Earth and Venus-like characteristics using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018.

Source: MIT News