Earth-sized planet tagged posts

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Launched in 2018, TESS is in the process of scanning about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun, searching for potential transiting exoplanets. To date, it has identified more than 7,900 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 760 have been confirmed.

Nearby M dwarf draws attent...

Surface of Mercury – credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington/USGS/Arizona State University

A hot, metallic, Earth-sized planet with a density similar to Mercury – situated 339 million light years away – has been detected and characterised by a global team of astronomers, including the University of Warwick. Named K2-229b, the planet is almost 20% larger than Earth but has a mass which is over 2.5X greater – and reaches a dayside temperature of over 2000°C (2330 Kelvin). It finds itself very close to its host star (0.012 AU, around a hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), which itself is a medium-sized active K dwarf in the Virgo Constellation. K2-229b orbits this star every fourteen hours.

Using the K2 telescope, Dr Armstrong and colleagues employed the D...