Scientists Find Earth-sized Planet. It⁘s Orbiting A Fascinating Star.

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Discovery alert: An Earth-sized planet with 17-hour year found - Times of India

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NASA's TESS Finds Intriguing World Sized Between Earth, Venus - NASA Science

Using observations by NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and many other facilities, two international teams of astronomers have discovered a planet between the sizes of Earth and Venus only 40 light-years away. Multiple factors make it a candidate well-suited for further study using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope .

TESS stares at a large swath of the sky for about a month at a time, tracking the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars at intervals ranging from 20 seconds to 30 minutes. Capturing transits — brief, regular dimmings of stars caused by the passage of orbiting worlds — is one of the mission's primary goals.

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Our medium-sized sun, in contrast, will shine for some 10 billion years before exhausting its fuel.

The small Jupiter -sized star is called "SPECULOOS-3," named after the Search for Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars research project, which aims to learn more about the worlds around these faint objects. This ultra-cool star is some 4,760 degrees Fahrenheit (2,627 Celsius), while the sun's surface is over 10,000 F (5,537 C).

But the nearby Earth-sized planet, called SPECULOOS-3 b, isn't exactly "cool." At such a close distance, it's walloped with radiation.

"Though this particular red dwarf is more than a thousand times dimmer than the sun, its planet orbits much, much closer than the Earth, heating up the planetary surface," Catherine Clark, a researcher at NASA⁘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who coauthored the new research recently published in Nature Astronomy , said in a statement . Blasted by solar storms and winds, it might not harbor much of an atmosphere, the space agency said.

Yet some rocky worlds, like a super-Earth found this year, inhabit the "habitable zone" around red dwarfs, meaning a region of space where water exists on the surface. It takes 19 days for this super-Earth (dubbed "TOI-715 b") to orbit its red dwarf ⁘ which is still relatively close. (A habitable zone around a red dwarf star can be just one percent the distance Earth is to the sun ).

To find this Earth-sized world, scientists employed a number of robotic telescopes around the world to look for a slight dimming of such ultra-cool red dwarf stars, which is caused by a distant world transiting in front. This allows astronomers to measure the size of the world and determine its density. Next, a space observatory like the James Webb Space Telescope ⁘ fitted with instruments able to detect the composition of exoplanet atmospheres and surface mineralogy ⁘ can further investigate this alien world. Research time on Webb is highly competitive, but NASA noted SPECULOOS-3 b is "an excellent candidate" for further research.