Thursday, 16 February 2023 – 09:06 WIB
LIVE Techno – An international team of researchers looking for transiting exoplanets (planets that cross the face of their host star from Earth’s point of view) has made its latest discovery, an Earth-sized object just 72 light years away.
K2-415b orbits the nearest red dwarf star K2-415. Researchers identified an exoplanet in data from NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope, replaced by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
Although K2-415b is not the closest known exoplanet to the size of Earth, on the cosmic scale K2-415b is one of our closest neighbors and it is a very interesting exoplanet for astronomers to study.
“The K2-415 system is unique in that K2-415 is one of the coolest or lowest-mass stars known to have exoplanets,” said Teruyuki Hirano of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Japan, lead author on a paper on the discovery.
In fact, only four stars cooler than K2-415 are known to host at least one exoplanet, including TRAPPIST-1 which has seven exoplanets, according to the Space website, Thursday, February 16, 2023.
“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.
