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Looking for Earth 2.0 in Binary Systems
While astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets over the last few decades, the true prize continues to elude them - they have yet to find an Earth-mass, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. That’s partially just due to cosmic geography - around half of all sun-like stars near us aren’t alone. They have one or more companion stars that complicate their orbital dynamics, as well as those of any planets they might host. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, suggests a new NASA Small Explorer mission called Searching for Habitable Exoplanets with Relative Astrometry (SHERA), which aims to use those complex dynamics to help find Earth-sized worlds in these multi-star systems.
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