Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet with a short orbital period. Preprint article about it published at arxiv.org.
TESS is a special exoplanet search satellite. It can’t get a direct view of them – instead, the apparatus catches the slightest fluctuations in a star’s brightness as it passes over the planetary disk. The discovery of such periodic darkening is considered the discovery of the planet.
Felipe Murgas of the Spanish University of La Laguna and his colleagues have discovered another similar planet. It is located in the HD 20329 system, 207 light-years from the Sun. The parent star has a mass of 90% of the Sun and belongs to the same spectral type as the Sun.
Planet HD 20329 b has a radius of 1.72 Earth and has a mass of about 7.42 times that of our planet, meaning it has an average density of 8.06 g/cm.2. Its orbital period is 22.2 hours, and the distance from the star to the planet is 1.8% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The temperature of the planet is about 2000K – much hotter than on Venus or Mercury. Therefore, HD 20329 b is a planet with an ultra-short orbital period. In total, astronomers know about 120 such objects.
Source: Gazeta
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