SPACE — An international team of researchers looking for exoplanets, planets outside the solar system, transiting has made its latest discovery. An object the size of Earth is drifting 72 light years away from us.
K2-415 b, as the newly discovered world is called, orbits the nearest red dwarf star, K2-415. Researchers identified the exoplanet in data from NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope. The data was later confirmed by its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
Although K2-415b is not the closest known exoplanet to Earth, on the cosmic scale it is one of our closest neighbors. And it’s a very interesting exoplanet for astronomers to study.
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“The K2-415 system is unique in that K2-415 is one of the coolest, or lowest-mass, stars known to have exoplanets,” Teruyuki Hirano, lead author on a paper on the discovery told Space.com.
In fact, only four stars cooler than K2-415 are known to host at least one exoplanet, including the famous TRAPPIST-1, which has seven known exoplanets. “One of the motivations for investigating planets around low-mass stars is to understand and clarify whether they form and evolve like planets around sun-type stars,” said Hirano.
Sun-type stars are stars that are similar to the sun. Red dwarfs, on the other hand, are much cooler and much smaller. K2-415 is estimated to have a surface temperature of about 5,250 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,900 degrees Celsius, compared to our sun’s 9,900 degrees F, or 5,480 degrees Celsius. K2-415 is only 0.2 solar radii in diameter and has a mass 0.16 times that of the Sun.
Ultimately, the more exoplanets that are discovered, and the more scientists learn about their star system, the higher the chances of finding more potentially habitable exoplanets. K2-415b is not in the habitable zone of its star. The habitable zone is the distance from the planet to the star where liquid water can exist on the world’s surface.
This exoplanet is so close to K2-415, that it only takes about four Earth days to complete its orbit. “But it is possible that there are other planets lurking in the system that are inside the habitable zone,” said Hirano.
Hirano hopes to study K2-415 b further, determining its mass and internal structure. Early estimates pinned the exoplanet to about three times as massive as Earth, despite having a radius of only 1.015 times that of Earth. But he also wants to move into orbit and system-wide architecture.
“So far, only one transiting planet has been found in the system, but this does not mean it is a ‘single’ system,” he said. Further radial velocity observations, as well as photometric monitoring, will be able to limit the presence of exoplanets in the system.
The findings in a paper about the team’s research have been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal and are currently available on the arXiv preprint server. Source: Space.com
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