Emily Chan
However, simply being in this zone does not mean that a planet is automatically habitable. For instance, Venus and Mars are both within the habitable zone of the sun, but their surfaces seem unsuitable for life.
Then, the team looked at data from 10 days of Chandra observations and 26 days of observations from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope to see how bright the stars are in X-rays, which helped narrow down the list.
They concluded that the brighter and more energetic the X-rays were, the more likely that any planets in the vicinity had severely damaged atmospheres or no atmospheres at all.
So far, they have identified stars with habitable zones where the X-ray radiation environment is similar to the one in which Earth evolved.
So, there could be planets with sizes, masses, and atmospheres like Earth that have currently not been discovered yet.
“We don’t know how many planets similar to Earth will be discovered in images with the next generation of telescopes, but we do know that observing time on them will be precious and extremely difficult to obtain,” said Edward Schwieterman, team member and researcher at the University of California, Riverside.
“These X-ray data are helping to refine and prioritize the list of targets and may allow the first image of a planet similar to Earth to be obtained more quickly.”
