TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – In our solar system, the small rocky Mercury is planet which orbits closest to the sun, which is constantly baked by solar radiation that is seven times more intense than what we experience on Earth.
Astronomers using data obtained from NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope have identified seven planets orbiting a star in our Milky Way galaxy, and all of them are suffering from the star’s fury – radiant energy – that is even more brutal than Mercury. It is the second most abundant planet discovered so far around any star outside our solar system.
The seven planets are larger than Earth, the largest of the four rocky planets in our solar system, but smaller than Neptune, the smallest of the four gaseous planets in our solar system. All have orbits closer to their parent star, called Kepler-385, than Mercury’s average distance to the Sun.
“All of the planets are ‘fried’ more intensely than any planet in our solar system,” said astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, lead author of the study that will be published in the Journal of Planetary Science and was recently posted. on the research site arXiv.
Scientists have to date identified more than 5,500 exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – and discovered hundreds of stars with multiple exoplanets. However, Kepler-385’s collection of seven exoplanets is only surpassed by the eight exoplanets known to orbit a star called Kepler-90. One other star, TRAPPIST-1, is known to have seven. Our solar system has eight planets.
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The Kepler space telescope, NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, was discontinued in 2018. It detects exoplanets by observing a small dip in a star’s brightness when a planet passes in front of it from our perspective.
The new study catalogs about 4,400 planets seen by the telescope from its launch in 2009 until its retirement. Scientists continue to analyze the data, as evidenced by the identification of the exoplanet population Kepler-385.
This study further illustrates that there are many different types of planetary systems – and many of them may not be very similar to our solar system. There are almost certainly more than eight planetary systems, but telescopes so far have not been sensitive enough to detect smaller exoplanets well.
The star Kepler-385 has a diameter and mass about 10% larger than our Sun, but is brighter and slightly hotter. It is located about 5,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
The smallest of its seven planets – 20% larger than Earth – orbits closest to the star, at a distance of just over 4% of the distance between our planet and the sun. The next planet is about 20% larger than the innermost planet.
“Both are likely rocky, and tidally locked, showing the same face towards their star at all times, as the moon does towards Earth,” Lissauer said. This makes them very hot near their closest point to the star. But because any atmosphere would likely have been boiling for a long time, the hemisphere facing away from the star would always be dark and very cold.
Most of the other planets are about 2.4 times larger than Earth. “All likely have thick, hot atmospheres across their surfaces, which may be well below their cloud tops,” Lissauer said. “The outermost planet orbits about 40% of the distance between Earth and the Sun. The distance is slightly smaller than the average distance between the Sun and Mercury.”
In search of life beyond Earth, these planets are not promising candidates. “The chance of life on any of these seven planets is very small,” said Lissauer. “There may be additional planets orbiting further away from the star that we don’t know about because they are more difficult to detect. In particular, if there were an Earth-sized planet in a system within Earth-Sun distance, we would not have detected it yet.”
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2023-11-07 02:45:59
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