Astronomers from the United States have discovered the planet G 9-40b, which is twice the size of Earth and is located in the habitable zone of its star. An article about the discovery was published in The Astronomical Journal.
Initially, the signal from a celestial body was detected by the Kepler telescope and presented as an exoplanet candidate. To better investigate the object, astronomers used the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberley telescope at McDonald Observatory. The observations made it possible to exclude the presence of a background star and confirmed that the transit occurred precisely due to the passage of the planet along the disk of the star. Observations from other telescopes, including the 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory and the three-meter Donald Shein telescope at the Lick Observatory, helped to confirm the findings.
The first observations made it possible to determine the upper limit of the exoplanet's mass, which turned out to be 12 Earths. G 9-40b orbits a dwarf star of spectral type M, just 100 light years from Earth. The most interesting thing is that the new planet was included in the twenty closest exoplanets discovered by transit methods to date.
The authors plan to get more observations with the HPF instrument to accurately measure the mass of an object. This will allow astronomers to determine its composition and find out if the planet is rocky or gaseous.
This discovery was made for the first time using the HPF instrument. With the help of it, astronomers now plan to better explore the dwarfs closest to Earth in order to find more exoplanets by the transit method. Due to the low luminosity of such stars, it is extremely difficult to fix a planet next to it, but the new system can help scientists in this.
Astronomers from the United States have discovered the planet G 9-40b, which is twice the size of Earth and is located in the habitable zone of its star. An article about the discovery was published in The Astronomical Journal.
Initially, the signal from a celestial body was detected by the Kepler telescope and presented as an exoplanet candidate. To better investigate the object, astronomers used the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF) spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberley telescope at McDonald Observatory. The observations made it possible to exclude the presence of a background star and confirmed that the transit occurred precisely due to the passage of the planet along the disk of the star. Observations from other telescopes, including the 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory and the three-meter Donald Shein telescope at the Lick Observatory, helped to confirm the findings.
The first observations made it possible to determine the upper limit of the exoplanet's mass, which turned out to be equal to 12 Earth's. G 9-40b orbits a dwarf star of spectral type M, just 100 light years from Earth. The most interesting thing is that the new planet was included in the twenty closest exoplanets discovered by transit methods to date.
The authors plan to get more observations with the HPF instrument to accurately measure the mass of an object. This will allow astronomers to determine its composition and find out if the planet is rocky or gaseous.
This discovery was made for the first time using the HPF instrument. With the help of it, astronomers now plan to better explore the dwarfs closest to Earth in order to find more exoplanets by the transit method. Due to the low luminosity of such stars, it is extremely difficult to fix a planet next to it, but the new system can help scientists in this.