One cup of magnesium, 1 cup of silicon, 2 cups of iron, 2 cups of oxygen, 1/2 teaspoon of aluminum, 1/2 teaspoon of nickel, 1/2 teaspoon of calcium, 1/4 teaspoon of sulfur and a trickle of water from a comet or asteroid.
These are the ingredients needed to make another Earth, according to research led by Courtney Dressing of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). And it is that, in his opinion, ” our Solar System is not as unique as we had thought. It seems that all rocky exoplanets use the same basic ingredients.”
Once these – the aforementioned ones – have been obtained, mix them in a large bowl, knead until you get a round ball and carefully place it in the habitable zone around a young star. Then heat until the dough turns into a bright, fiery white ball. Bake for a few million years. Cool until the color turns from white to yellow and then red and a brownish crust with golden tones forms. At this point, the dough should no longer emit any light.
Finally, season with a little water and organic compounds . The mass will shrink a bit as the steam escapes, forming clouds and oceans. Now we have to wait a few million more years to see what happens. Hopefully, a thin layer of life will appear, like a glaze, on the surface of the new world.
What Dressing and his team have discovered is that this “recipe” for making a habitable planet is also valid for other worlds orbiting other stars . Although not for anyone at random, but for those who meet a series of specific conditions.
The researchers used the HARPS-North instrument of the 3.6-meter Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, installed in the Canary Islands, for this work. HARPS (High-Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) stands for “High Precision Radial Velocity Planet Searcher”, and is designed to accurately measure the masses of small worlds, similar in size to Earth. These measurements are of the utmost importance in determining the densities and composition of the exoplanets detected.
Dressing’s team looked at Kepler 93b, a celestial body that is 1.5 times the size of Earth and orbits its star for 4.7 days. Its mass was determined by HARPS-North as 4.02 times that of the Earth, which means that it is a rocky world. The researchers then compared the data with those of ten exoplanets with diameters less than 2.7 times that of Earth and accurately calculated their masses.
The result was that five planets with diameters less than 1.6 times the terrestrial one kept a close relationship between masses and sizes , which proved that all of them had a very similar composition of iron and rocks, and also similar to that of our planet. .
In contrast, those that were larger had significantly lower densities. So, according to Dressing, “to find a world that is truly similar to ours, we should focus on planets less than 1.6 times the size of Earth, because those are rocky worlds.”
