The spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) of the POT Hello a rocky planet the size of Earth 100 light years away. The find was baptized by the experts with the name TOI 700e and has the particularity that “orbit in a habitable zone”according to specialists.
The body was given the letter “e” because scientists previously found three other planets in the same system, which they had named TOI 700 ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’.
TOI 700 e orbits at a distance from its star where could there be liquid water.
The planet recently discovered by the TESS spacecraft is 95% the size of Earth and it is “very likely” that its constitution is rockyglimpse NASA.
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But the most significant thing about the star system is that the planet ‘d’ it also orbits in the zone that would be habitable.
“This is one of the few systems with multiple small planets in habitable zones that we know of”explained Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California and director of the research.
This creates the conditions for the TOI 700 system to be “an interesting prospect for further monitoring.”
“Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us to find smaller and smaller worlds“, clarified the expert.
The star orbited by planets b, c, d and e is a “cool little M dwarf star” located in the golden austral constellation. It is called TOI 700 and is located at a distance of 100 light years from Earth.
the innermost planet, TOI 700bhas according to astronomers approximately the 90% the size of the Earth and orbits the star every 10 days, while TOI 700 c is more than 2.5 times larger than our planet and completes one orbit every 16 days.
On the other hand, planet D is in a 37-day orbit.
Astronomers speculate that these planets could be “tidal” regulators, in the same way that the Earth is with the moon. This means that they rotate “only once per orbit” and one side always faces the star, which would confirm a movement analogous to our lunar satellite.
In that sense, TOI 700ethat could also receive the influence of tides, takes a period of 28 days to orbit its starwhich places planet e between planets c and d, in the so-called “optimistic habitable zone”, where liquid surface water “could be present”.
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This area straddles the “conservative” habitable zone, the range where researchers say liquid water could exist for most of the planet’s lifetime.
Finding other systems with Earth-sized worlds in this region helps scientists further lines of research on the Solar system.
“TESS has just completed its second year of northern sky observations”said Allison Youngblood, a research astrophysicist and deputy TESS project scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Until now, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets searching for signs of extraterrestrial life or for the academic purpose of learning more about our solar system.
However, this represents only one small proportion of those that exist “only in the Milky Way”.
Over the course of 2022, more than 300 were identified, including “water worlds” as well as “gas giants”. Indeed, most exoplanets are gaseous, like Jupiter or Neptune, rather than terrestrial, according to NASA conclusions.
TESS identified hundreds of exoplanets
Since the TESS spacecraft was launched in 2018, it has identified more than 260 exoplanets you confirm and you have a catalog of more than 4,000 still to be verified.
The spacecraft is equipped with four cameras that reach to cover 85% of the entire sky, while it continues in the search for exoplanets orbiting stars less than 300 light-years away.
In its first year of operation, it mapped the 13 sectors that make up the southern sky and toured the northern fringes the following year.
“If the star were a little closer or the planet was a little bigger, we could have detected TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data,” thought Ben Hord, a specialist at the University of Maryland.
“But the signal was so weak that we needed an additional year of transit observations to identify it,” the scientist explained.
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