Astronomers discover new exoplanet with the mass of Saturn

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new Saturn-mass planet orbiting a Sun-like star called TOI-2447. The results were published in a research paper published on May 12 on the preprint server arXiv. To date, TESS has identified more than 7,100 potential exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 445 have been confirmed. Since its launch in April 2018, the satellite has surveyed about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun, with the aim of searching for extrasolar planets, from small rocky planets to gaseous giants. I’ve been there. A group of astronomers led by Samuel Gill at the University of Warwick, UK, reports confirmation of another TOI monitored by TESS. They detected a passing signal on TOI-2447’s light curve, which turned out to be essentially a planet. The newly discovered exoplanet was named TOI-2447 b or NGTS-29 b, as Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) data was also used to confirm the planet’s condition. “TOI-2447 b is a candidate transiting exoplanet based on a single transit event at 1.3 percent depth and 7.29 hours duration in TESS Sector 31 and a previous transit event in 2017 in NGTS data. ,” the researchers explained. The radius of the newly discovered exoplanet is 0.86 the radius of Jupiter, and the mass is 0.39 the mass of Jupiter. It orbits its host every 69.34 days at a distance of 0.35 AU. The equilibrium temperature of TOI-2447 b is estimated to be 414 K, which is generally lower than that of most planets discovered by TESS. Parent star TOI-2447 (also known as TIC-1167538) is a bright dwarf star of spectral class G9V. Its size and mass are comparable to the Sun, and its metallicity is 0.18 Dex. The age of this star is estimated to be 2.1 billion years, and its effective temperature is approximately 5,730K. Researchers also collected strong evidence of other planets orbiting TOI-2447. They identified transit signals in the NGTS data. This does not come from TOI-2447, but probably from another passing object. Furthermore, based on radial velocity data from the high-resolution Echelle spectrometer Chiron, they found evidence for the existence of an exoplanet with an orbital period of approximately 150 days. However, further observations are needed to confirm the planetary nature of these signals. “We continue to monitor TOI-2447 using photometry and spectroscopy to better characterize these signals and determine the properties of additional planets in the system,” the paper’s authors wrote. concludes.

source: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2405.07367