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UC
Riverside Astrophysicist Helps lead Exoplanet Discovery Mission
By
Jules Bernstein
NASA’s
newest planet-hunting satellite has discovered a type of planet
missing from our own solar system.
Launched
in 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has
found three new worlds around a neighboring star. Stephen Kane,
a UC Riverside associate professor of planetary astrophysics, says
the new star system, called TESS Object of Interest, or TOI-270, is
exactly what the satellite was designed to find.
A
paper describing TOI-270 has been published in the journal Nature
Astronomy and is now available online. Of the three new exoplanets,
meaning they’re outside our solar system, one is rocky and slightly
larger than Earth, while the two others are gaseous and roughly twice
Earth’s size.
Not
only is the smaller planet in the habitable zone — the range of
distances from a star that are warm enough to allow liquid-water
oceans on a planet — but the TOI-270 star is nearby, making it
brighter for viewing. It’s also “quiet,” meaning it has few
flares and allows scientists to observe it and its orbiting planets
more easily.
“We’ve
found very few planets like this in the habitable zone, and many
fewer around a quiet star, so this is rare,” said Kane. “We
don’t have a planet quite like this in our solar system.”
In
our own solar system, there are either small, rocky planets like
Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, or much larger planets like Saturn,
Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune that are dominated by gasses rather than
land. We don’t have planets about half the size of Neptune, though
these are common around other stars.
“TOI-270
will soon allow us to study this “missing link” between rocky
Earth-like planets and gas-dominant mini-Neptunes, because here all
of these types formed in the same system,” said lead researcher
Maximilian Gunther, a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Follow-up
observations on the system have been planned for 2021, when the James
Webb Space Telescope launches. It will be able to measure the
composition of the TOI-270 planets’ atmospheres for oxygen,
hydrogen, and carbon monoxide.
Kane
says these kinds of observations can help determine whether a planet
has ever had a liquid water ocean, and whether any of the planets has
conditions suitable for life as we know it.
While
TOI-270 is far enough away that no one living will likely ever travel
there, at 73 light-years away it is still considered close.
“The
diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light years, and our galaxy is just
one of millions of galaxies,” Kane said. “So, 73 light
years means it’s one of our neighboring stars.”
TESS
is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and
managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners
include Northrop Grumman, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, MIT’s Lincoln
Laboratory, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a
dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide
are participants in the mission.
Kane,
a member of UCR’s NASA-funded Alternative Earths Astrobiology
Center, is available for media interviews about TESS and his
involvement in analyzing its data and observations.
He
and the team hope further research will reveal additional planets in
the system beyond the three now known. The smaller planet is unlikely
to host life because its surface could be too warm for the presence
of liquid water. But additional planets at greater distances from the
star might be cooler, allowing water to pool on their surfaces.
Press Release Provided
By the University of California Riverside
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