Astronomers have discovered an unusual Earth-sized exoplanet with one hemisphere of lava and the other believed to be trapped in eternal darkness by the tides. Co-authors and research leaders Benjamin Capistrant (University of Florida) and Melinda Soares-Furtado (University of Wisconsin-Madison) provided details yesterday’s meeting, meeting Member of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.Ann Related papers It was just published in an astronomical journal.another paper A paper by another group published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics describes the discovery of a rare, small, cold exoplanet with a giant external companion star 100 times the mass of Jupiter.
As previously reported, thanks to the huge amount of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now know what types of planets are out there, where they orbit, and It gave me a good idea of how common the different types are. What we lack is an understanding of what that means regarding the situation on the planet itself. Kepler tells us the size of a planet, but it doesn’t tell us what the planet is made of. And planets in the “habitable zone” around a star could match anything from a scorching hellhole to an icy rock.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched with the goal of helping us understand what exoplanets actually look like. TESS is designed to identify planets orbiting bright stars relatively close to Earth, conditions that will allow follow-up observations to determine the composition of the planets and potentially their atmospheres. It should be.
Both Kepler and TESS use the so-called transit method to identify planets. This works in a system where the planets orbit on a plane that moves between the host star and the Earth. When this happens, a small portion of the star’s light that is visible from Earth (or nearby orbit) is blocked by the planet. If such a drop in light occurs regularly, we can diagnose that something is orbiting the star.
This tells us something about Earth. The frequency of a star’s light dip indicates the time it takes to complete its orbit, which tells us how far the planet is from its host star. Combining this with the brightness of the host star will tell you how much light the planet receives, which will affect its temperature. (The range of distance where the temperature matches that of liquid water is called the habitable zone.) We then use that, along with how much light is blocked, to figure out how big the planet is. can.
But to truly understand other planets and their potential to support life, we need to understand what they’re made of and what their atmospheres are like. TESS won’t answer these questions, but it is designed to find planets using other instruments that can answer them.