Astronomers discover a planetary system with a Neptune-mass planet and a massive sub-stellar object

A global crew of astronomers reviews the detection of a brand new planetary system by observing a close-by star referred to as HD 18599 (or TOI-179). It seems that this star is orbited by a Neptune-mass exoplanet and an enormous sub-stellar object. The discovering was detailed in a paper revealed October 14 on the arXiv pre-print server.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars close to the sun with the purpose of looking for transiting exoplanets. To this point, it has recognized practically 6,000 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Curiosity, or TOI), of which 266 have been confirmed to this point.

Now, a gaggle of astronomers led by Silvano Desidera of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, has just lately confirmed one other TOI monitored by TESS. They report {that a} transit sign has been recognized within the mild curve of a vivid Okay-dwarf star—TOI-179 (different designations HD 18599 and HIP 13754). The planetary nature of this sign was confirmed by follow-up observations utilizing the Excessive Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and Spectro-Polarimetric Excessive-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) devices.

“As a part of on-going efforts to validate and characterize younger transiting exoplanets recognized by TESS, we current on this paper our evaluation for the system noticed across the star HD 18599 = HIP 13754, a vivid (V=8.99 magazine) and energetic Okay dwarf, often known as TESS Object of Curiosity (TOI)-179,” the researchers wrote within the paper.

The newfound alien world, designated TOI-179 b, is about 2.62 occasions bigger than the Earth and 24 occasions extra large than our planet, which yields a comparatively excessive imply density of some 7.4 g/cm³. The exoplanet orbits its host each 4.14 days, at a distance of 0.048 AU from it, on a considerably eccentric orbit.

Moreover, SPHERE observations recognized one other object within the TOI-179 system with an estimated mass of about 83 Jupiter plenty—due to this fact, on the boundary between brown dwarfs and really low-mass stars. The item acquired designation HD 18599 B has a comparatively small projected separation from the father or mother star—some 3.3 AU.

The host star TOI-179 is of spectral sort K2V, has a radius of roughly 0.76 solar radii, whereas its mass was measured to be 0.83 solar masses. The star is estimated to be round 400 million years outdated and its effective temperature is at a stage of 5,145 Okay.

Summing up the outcomes, the authors of the research underlined the distinctiveness of the TOI-179 system making an allowance for the properties of its elements.

“The TOI-179 system represents a high-merit laboratory for our understanding of the bodily evolution of planets and different low-mass objects and of how the planet properties are influenced by dynamical results and interactions with the parent star,” the researchers concluded.

© 2022 Science X Community