NASA discovering another planet. Earth twin?

In 2020, the same team of scientists announced the discovery of another Earth twin of this system, the planet TOI 700 d, which orbits the star every 37 days and is also in the habitable zone. Then the planets TOI 700 b and c were discovered. It took another year of observations to discover the planet TOI 700 e. Now we know that there is and it orbits its star every 28 days.

Astronomers know of very few systems in which there is more than one relatively small planet in the star’s habitable zone – underlines the head of the research group, Dr. Emily Gilbert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California – This makes the system around the star TOI 700 particularly interesting and worthy of further observations. Planet e is 10 percent. smaller than planet d, their discovery in that order shows that further TESS observations should allow us to find smaller and smaller objects. The inner planet of TOI 700 b is about 90 percent the size of the planet. About the size of Earth and orbiting the star every 10 days, TOI 700 c is 2.5 times the size of Earth and has an orbital period of 16 days. As the moon is relative to the earth, so these pthe lanettes are probably always facing their star with the same side.

TESS monitors patches of sky for 27 days. During this time it looks for planets that pass in front of its star and thus cause a periodic decrease in their brightness.

Other planets in this system were discovered from 2018 data, and TOI planet 700 and appeared in 2020 data when TESS again surveyed the skies above the Southern Hemisphere.

These additional observations have also allowed us to refine the data on planets previously discovered there, their sizes have been found to be 10 percent larger on average. less than initially calculated.

Gilbert presented the discovery at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Association in Seattle. An article on the subject has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.