Astronomers, supported by amateur “citizen scientists”, have discovered an exoplanet located in the habitable zone of an unusual star system consisting of two stars. Perhaps there are more interesting planets in the system.
The Neptune-sized planet was seen passing in front of its star, temporarily reducing the strength of its light reaching us. This “transit method” is a common way to identify planets, especially those whose orbits are tight around the star. Planets that orbit their star at a relatively close distance are more likely than others to be between the star’s light and an Earth observer. Then we can see distant planets – they are themselves invisible to us, but we see a fading point of the star itself, somewhat similar to a solar eclipse seen from Earth.
Another important advantage of Tygo-type planets is that their proximity to an active star may allow life to exist on them. We therefore say that the planet is located in the “habitable zone”, that is, the region whose conditions would be similar to those on Earth and which is located at the appropriate distance from the star for liquid water to remain on the surface.
The orbital year of a discovered exoplanet (that is, a planet outside our solar system) is 272 days, which is slightly shorter than an Earth year. The whole arrangement is interesting for several reasons.
The star the planet orbits is the brightest star on which a planet has yet been discovered. Moreover, researchers suspect the existence of another planet that orbits very close to the stars, and the orbital year lasts only 34 days. But the most interesting thing is that there is another star orbiting around the star.
These types of star systems with identified planets are very rare and therefore valuable to scientists who can enrich their knowledge of typical phenomena such as planet formation by observing unusual phenomena.
The newly discovered planet has its official name: TOI 4633 c, but scientists have decided to call it Percival (in Polish: Parsifal), after one of the Knights of the Round Table (or, as some prefer, one of Harry’s heroes). the Potter novel). The star was first identified by citizen scientists who analyzed data collected by NASA’s Transitioning Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Planet Hunters, built on TESS, allows anyone with a computer with an Internet connection to search for undiscovered planets. The discovery and processed data were presented in a scientific article published on April 30 (2023) in “The Astrophysical Journal”.
Citizen scientists are not professional researchers, but rather people who spend their free time participating in scientific projects that are open to them, helping institutional researchers sift through large data sets and occasionally making discoveries themselves. To date, more than 43,000 volunteers from 90 different countries have participated in the Planet Hunters project. Together they discovered and cataloged 25 million objects. This time, the lucky discoverer is Dane Simon Bentzen, who has been working for Planet Hunters since 2018. Besides him, 14 other people have tagged the same planet, prompting Nora Eisner and her team of astronomers at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of Flatiron Institute. to… New York to take the necessary steps. The first observations allowed scientists to discover the second planet. However, only after careful observation did scientists realize that what they thought was a single star was actually a system of two stars orbiting each other.
Research: Nora L. Eisner et al., Planet Hunters TESS. V. A planetary system around a binary star, including a young Neptune in the habitable zone, The Astronomical Journal (2024). two: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad1d5c
TESS Planet Hunters Project: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-hunters-tess
Prepared from the article Citizen scientists help discover record exoplanet in binary star system Published on Phys.org
