Israeli astronomers have reported the discovery of a previously unknown Jupiter-like exoplanet. It orbits around a red dwarf relatively close to the Sun.
The discovery was made with the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. It can detect changes in the radial velocity of the star that are on the order of 1 m/s. Such fluctuations usually indicate that it has unseen companions.
The high accuracy of the measurements makes HARPS one of the most effective tools for searching for extrasolar worlds using the radial velocity method, as evidenced by this new finding. It was made by Israeli astronomers while analyzing the HARPS-RVBank database, containing more than 250,000 radial velocity measurements of 5,239 stars made by HARPS through January 2022.
Scientists have managed to detect fluctuations in the radial velocity of the star GJ 2126. It is a red dwarf located 124 light-years from the Sun. There is at least one exoplanet orbiting around it, whose mass is 1.3 times that of Jupiter.
The circulation period of the newly discovered world is 272.7 days. It moves in a very elongated orbit whose eccentricity is 0.85. At pericenter, the gas giant approaches its star at a distance of 0.11 a.u., while at apocenter it moves away from it at 1.31 a.u.
According to astronomers, it is one of the most eccentric exoplanets found in red dwarfs. Since the orbital inclination of this world is unknown, its mass could be much larger than current estimates, and the possibility that this object may be a brown dwarf cannot be completely ruled out.
As for the high eccentricity, the most likely explanation is gravitational interaction with other exoplanets. In this case, GJ 2126 has other companions that may be discovered with new observations.
According to Phys.org
