According to a preprint, an international team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of a Venus-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf 40 light-years from Earth. released in repository arXiv.
The planet was named LHS 475 b and was identified thanks to NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, which searches for exoplanets using the transit method – when a large celestial body passes against the background of a stellar disk (this is referred to as a falling light curve) .
To date, approximately 6,400 exoplanet candidates have been identified, of which 3,032 have been confirmed.
LHS 475 b has a radius of 0.955 the radius of Earth, taking 48.7 hours to complete one revolution around the parent star at a distance of 0.02 astronomical units (about 15 times closer to the Sun than Mercury).
The mass of the planet has yet to be determined, but it is likely to be rocky and have a subsurface composition similar to that of Earth.
Formerly Japanese National Institute of Natural Sciences knowledgeablethat astronomers directly observed exoplanet HIP 99770 b.