Orbiting telescope TESS has discovered another exoplanet. It turned out to be a gas giant the size of Saturn, but much warmer than it. It orbits around its star, which is very similar to the Sun, in just 21.5 days.
TESS — a planet discoverer
An international team of scientists led by Romy Rodriguez of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recently published a paper describing the discovery of a new exoplanet. Data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) helped them do this.
TESS has long been one of the most important instruments for the discovery of exoplanets. It now has about 7,300 credible candidates behind it, 751 of which have already been confirmed by other methods. Since its launch in 2018, it has continuously observed about 200,000 stars.
Scientists observed the star TOI-4994 also known as TIC 277128619. This yellow luminary is located 1,079 light-years away. Studies have found that its diameter is 5% larger than the solar diameter, its age is 6.3 billion years, and its surface temperature is 5640 K.
Warm Saturn
But the most important thing the scientists discovered was a “dip” in the star’s radiation curve. The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) has already confirmed that it is a planet. It has a diameter of 76 percent of Jupiter’s, meaning it can be compared to Saturn.
However, unlike it, it has no rings and is much closer to its star, in the so-called “warm zone”. Its distance from the local sun is 0.15 a.u., and it makes one orbit around it in 21.5 days.
The newly discovered planet is similar to Saturn not only in size but also in density, which is 0.78 g/cm3. This means that the matter of this planet is on average smaller than that of water. The temperature, on the other hand, is 717.6 K.
Provided by phys.org
