TRIBUNGORONTALO.COM — Astronomers have discovered 85 possible planets outside our solar system with temperatures potentially cold enough to support life.
This exoplanet candidate is similar in size to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, and was discovered using data from Transitional Exoplanet Survey Satellite NASA (TESS).
TESS allows scientists to observe a decrease in a star’s brightness, known as a transit, caused by an object passing in front of it.
Typically, at least three transits need to be seen to find exoplanets this way, to determine how long they orbit their stars.
However, in this new study, the researchers observed a system that only transited twice, which resulted in planets with longer orbital periods, allowing the discovery of exoplanets at cooler temperatures.
These 85 exoplanet candidates take between 20 and 700 days to orbit their host stars, while most of the exoplanets observed by TESS have orbital periods of 3-10 days.
Researchers say that some planets are far enough from their host stars that they can be at the right temperature to support life. This is known as the “habitable zone”.
At this stage, these objects still need to be confirmed as exoplanets, but researchers hope this will be achieved with future observations.
Sixty of the 85 potential exoplanets are new discoveries, while 25 have been detected in TESS data by independent research teams using different techniques.
“We ran an initial algorithm to search for transits on a sample of 1.4 million stars. “After a careful vetting process, we whittled it down to just 85 systems that appear to host exoplanets that only transited twice in the dataset,” said Faith Hawthorn, PhD researcher at the University of Warwick.
“It is very exciting to discover these planets, and to know that many of them may be in the right temperature zone to support life,” added Professor Daniel Bayliss, who was also involved in the research.
Following the collaborative spirit of the TESS mission, Daniel said his party has also published his findings so that astronomers around the world can study this unique exoplanet in more detail.
“We hope this will encourage further research into these interesting exoplanets,” he hopes.
Dr Sam Gill, author of both studies, noted that detecting exoplanets from just two transits is a smart way to find longer period exoplanets in transit surveys.
This makes it possible to find much cooler planets than can be found with traditional transit searches.
The international collaboration led by Ms Hawthorn at the University of Warwick was published on Tuesday (23/1/2024) in Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
2024-01-24 01:36:03
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