Twelve light years away from Earth is Teegarden’s Star, a star roughly twice as big and twice as old as our Sun.Now, an international team of scientists, which included Israeli scientists from the Weizmann Institute, say that this red sun has two planets nearby which could possibly contain life.
Claiming that both planets “are potentially habitable,” Dr. Ignasi Ribas from the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia told the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics that eventually we will see “if they are actually habitable and, perhaps, even inhabited,” National Geographic reported.Ribas and his team found the planets while working at Spain's Calar Alto Observatory.
University of Göttingen researcher Mathias Zechmeister explained to phys.org that both planets are in the "inhabitable zone," which means water might be found on them.
The star - the 24th nearest known star to us - was named after the person who found it, NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden. It is an ultra-cool M dwarf, meaning most light it emits is infrared. The two planets circling it complete their orbits in 4.9 earth-days (Teegarden’s Star b) and 11.4 days (Teegarden’s Star c).
These planets are the 10th and 11th planets to be discovered since 2016 when the Spanish-German efforts to discover new planets began.