Tomasz Nowakowski is a writer for the website Phys.org.
The radial velocities of Harps and Corrais are orange and blue. We present our RV time series in this figure. The data shows a long-term and high-amplitude trend, typical of the signature of a long period giant planet. Credit: arXiv:2111.08764v1
Two new exoplanets have been found by an international team of astronomer. The planets found using NASA's Kepler telescope were classified as hot super-Mercury and cold Jupiter. A paper detailing the discovery was published on arXiv.org.
More than 2,600 exoplanets have been discovered by the telescope, which is the most prolific. After the failure of its two reaction wheels, the mission was turned into K2 to perform high-precision photometry of selected fields. Hundreds of new extrasolar worlds have been detected by the revived Kepler spacecraft.
A group of astronomer led by Tomas Silva of the University of Porto, Portugal, have found two more planets. The telescope observed a mid-G star named HD 137496, also known as K2-364), as part of the K2 mission from August 23, 2017 to November 19, 2017. The transit signals in the light curve of HD 137496 were confirmed by RV observations from the HARPS and CORALIE spectrographs.
The discovery of a planetary system was reported. The researchers wrote in the paper that they were able to accurately characterize the stellar host, study its chemical composition, and put strong constraints on the planetary companions by using photometry from K2 and precise RVs from both HARPS and CORALIE.
HD 137496 b is 30 percent larger than the Earth and four times more massive than our planet, giving it a density of 10.49 g/ cm3. The planet is made of iron and has a core that is 70% of the object's mass. HD 137496 b was classified as a hot super-Mercury because of its equilibrium temperature of 2,130 K.
HD 137496 c is the second newly discovered exoplanet. It was classified as a cold Jupiter because of its minimum mass being about 7.66 Jupiter mass and its equilibrium temperature being about 350 K.
HD 137496 has an age of about 8.3 billion years and is a sun-like star. Its metallicity was found to be at a level of -0.03.
The astronomer highlighted the peculiarity of the newly detected planetary system. HD 137496 b is one of the few dense planets that is well-characterized, and it is an interesting target for testing theories of planet formation and density enhancing mechanisms. HD 137496 c is a high-eccentricity planet and it could be an interesting target for planetary evolution studies.
The HD 137496 system is a dense, hot super-Mercury and a cold Jupiter.
The Science X Network will be launched in 2021.
The two exoplanets were retrieved from the sun-like star on November 26, 2021.
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