TESS discovers an old warm Jupiter-like exoplanet

Tomasz Nowakowski is a member of the physics.org community.

A new Jupiter-like alien world has been detected using the TESS satellite. The size of Jupiter is about 30% larger than the solar system's largest gas giant. There is a paper on the arXiv pre-print server.

The aim of the survey is to find transiting exoplanets, which are planets outside the solar system. There are nearly 6,000 candidate exoplanets that have been identified so far.

A group of astronomer led by Nolan Grieves of the University ofGeneva in Switzerland have recently confirmed a TOI. There is a transit signal in the light curve of a metal-poor G dwarf. The planetary nature of the signal was confirmed with follow up observations.

The Jupiter TOI 5542 b was discovered and characterized. The planet was first detected by TESS as two single transit events.

A density of 1.6 g/ cm 3 is achieved by the newfound exoplanet, which has a mass of 1.32 Jupiters. Its parent star is at a distance of 0.33AU from it. Astronomers classified the planet as a warm Jupiter because of its equilibrium temperature.

The host TOI-5542 is of a type called G3V and is less massive than the sun. The star has an effective temperature of 5,700 K and an age of over 10 billion years. The measurement of TOI-5542's metallicity was negative 21.

The researchers said that TOI 5542 is one of the oldest known long-period warm Jupiters and one of the few with an age estimate.

"TOI-5542b is one of the oldest warm Jupiters and it is cool enough to be unaffected by inflation, making it a valuable contribution in the context of planetary composition and formation studies," the paper concluded.

The researchers noted that it is difficult to predict a formation or migration pathway on this planet. It is assumed that disk migration or in situ formation is one of the mechanisms that is more likely to leave a planet around its parent star.

More information: Nolan Grieves et al, An old warm Jupiter orbiting the metal-poor G-dwarf TOI-5542. arXiv:2209.14830v1 [astro-ph.EP], arxiv.org/abs/2209.14830

There is a science network.