Astronomers discover new exoplanet the size of Saturn

An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. The newly discovered alien world, called TOI-1135 b, is young, hot, and comparable in size to Saturn. This discovery was detailed in an article published on February 27 on the preprint server arXiv. To date, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has identified approximately 7,100 potential exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest (TOI)), of which 420 have been discovered to date. Confirmed. Since its launch in April 2018, TESS has used a series of wide-field cameras to detect around 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun, with the aim of searching for passing exoplanets, including giant exoplanets. I have researched the pieces. A group of astronomers led by Manuel Mallorquín Díaz from the University of La Laguna in Spain confirmed another TOI observed by TESS. They identified a transit signal in the light curve of TOI-1135 (also known as HIP 62908 or TIC 154872375), a young Sun-like star of spectral class G0 located about 371 light-years away. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by subsequent photometry and spectroscopy. “This paper presents the discovery and mass characterization of a nearby gas giant planet orbiting the young Sun-like star TOI-1135,” the researchers wrote. TOI-1135 b has a radius of approximately 0.8 Jupiter’s radius and a mass of approximately 0.062 Jupiter masses, which corresponds to a density of 0.16 g/cm3. The planet orbits its star every 8.02 days at a distance of 0.082 astronomical units. The equilibrium temperature of TOI-1135 b is estimated to be approximately 950–1,200 K. Therefore, the obtained results suggest that TOI-1135 b is an expanded exoplanet, similar in size to Saturn but less massive than her two largest gas giants in the solar system. . The planet has a vast atmosphere, likely due to strong stellar radiation. Astronomers believe that TOI-1135 b may be losing its atmosphere through photoevaporation. They found that the planet’s mass loss rate was high, about 39 Earth masses per billion years, and that it would eventually lose most of its atmosphere after a few hundred million years. “Giant planets with less mass than Saturn tend to lose all or most of their atmosphere early on if they receive enough radiation from their parent star, and this may be the case for TOI-1135 b. “There is,” the authors explain in their paper. The parent star TOI-1135 is slightly larger and more massive than the Sun, and its luminosity is 1.7 times that of the Sun. The age of this star is estimated to be between 125 million and 1 billion years, and its effective temperature is approximately 6122 K.

source: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2402.17448