super-Earth tagged posts

An artist’s conception of a distant Solar System Planet X, which could be shaping the orbits of smaller extremely distant outer Solar System objects like 2015 TG387 discovered by a team of Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard, Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen.
Credit: Illustration by Roberto Molar Candanosa and Scott Sheppard, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science.

The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, will be announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Astronomers have discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X.

Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues – Northern Arizona University’s...

Artistic simulation of a planetary system composed by three rocky planets with the same size of the Earth. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC)

Today marks the discovery of two new planetary systems, one of them hosting three planets with the same size of the Earth. The information about these new exoplanets has been obtained from the data collected by the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which started in November 2013. The work, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the magazine Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), reveals the existence of two new planetary systems detected from the eclipses they produce in the stellar light of their respective stars...

“A super-Earth orbiting the nearby M-dwarf GJ 536”, by A. Suárez Mascareño, J. I. González Hernández, R. Rebolo, N. Astudillo-Defru, X. Bonfils, F. Bouchy, X. Delfosse, T. Forveille, C. Lovis, M. Mayor, F. Murgas, F. Pepe, N. C. Santos, S. Udry, A. Wünsche and S. Velasco. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Its short orbital period could help with future studies of biological activity. Researchers have discovered a “super-Earth” type planet, GJ 536 b, whose mass is around 5.4 Earth masses, in orbit around a nearby very bright star. The exoplanet is not within the star’s habitable zone, but its short orbital period of 8...

K2 light curve of HD 3167. Top: the full K2 light curve. Both the numerous, shallow transits of HD 3167 b and three deeper transits of HD 3167 c are evident in the light curve by eye. Bottom left: K2 light curve (grey dots) phase folded on the transits of HD 3167 b, and best-fit transit model (thick purple line). Bottom right: K2 light curve (grey dots) phase folded on the transits of HD 3167 c, and best-fit transit model (thick purple line). Credit: Vanderburg et al., 2016.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft continues its fruitful exoplanet hunt with the newest discovery of 2 super-Earth-sized alien worlds. The newly detected planets are orbiting a nearby sun-sized star HD 3167, 150 light years away...