'E.T. phone home?' The message is not quite that clear, but NASA says a planet is releasing mysterious 'signals' into the universe. And it's not just any planet because scientists are calling it a "super Earth" and there are suspicions it may hold water.
Grab a cup of sugar and prepare to meet a new neighbor. This one is named TOI-1846, and it's an exo-planet four times bigger than our own planet and it pivots around a star. And you'd better check the expiration date on that sugar because it's 154 light years away.
"To put that into perspective, it would take a car driving at 60mph about 2 billion years to get there," The Independent reported.
It takes TOI-1846 only a dizzying 3.9 days to complete one orbit of its star, per NASA. Its star is an M-type, which NASA identifies as redder, cooler and dimmer than our sun. An exoplanet is one that orbits a star outside our solar system, and the term 'super' is used for a planet larger than our Earth.
As Daily Mail reported, "the newly-identified world is likely to be terrestrial, or rocky, in the same way as Earth, rather than gaseous."
So, we know that much about it, but the mystery is why it is flashing a strange signal on a repeating bases. And by signal, we mean its light dims and re-lights at the same intervals over and over, like a Morse code of light.
Here's how Daily Mail explains the discovery of the signal: "Because red dwarfs are smaller and dimmer, planets must orbit close to receive warmth, which also makes it easier for telescopes to detect them as they pass in front of the star."
The dimming light was discovered by NASA's TESS space telescope, which launched in 2018 with four high-sensitivity cameras that scan the sky every 30 minutes "making it ideal for spotting shallow light dips like those from TOI-1846 b."
And here's another Earth-shaking factoid, "What’s especially interesting for scientists, after considering these measurements, the team of astronomers claims that TOI-1846 b has water," per Orbital Today. The newly discovered planet is also likely tidally locked, meaning one side always faces its star while the other remains in darkness.
The suspicion about water comes because scientists say the extreme temperature contrast could allow water to be trapped in cooler regions, depending on how heat moves through the atmosphere. Estimates say the temperature should be about 295°C -- or 563 degrees Fahrenheit -- on the planet’s surface, as only one side of it is ever facing its sun.
So, it's a tad spicier than, say, summer in the Deep South of the United States.
Still, those elements together means NASA wants to take a closer look at whether the planet is potentially habitable and what those signals could mean. To that end, scientists hope the James Webb Space Telescope will soon target TOI-1846 b to study its atmosphere using infrared light.