A new discovery is creating a buzz in the scientific community. Citizen scientists, part of the Planet Hunters TESS project, have found two exoplanets orbiting a Sun-like star.
Royal Astronomical Society lists over a dozen citizen scientists, who participated in the project led by Nasa, to have published the new discoveries.
The sun-like star, dubbed as HD 152843, is about 352 light-years away from Earth and is about the same mass as the Sun But it’s about 1.5 times bigger and brighter. Orbiting this massive star are two exotic worlds and, if compared to our Sun, they lie within the orbit of Mercury.
Planet b is 3.4 times bigger than Earth but similar to the size of Neptune and orbits the star in 12 days. Meanwhile, Planet c is at a farther distance and 5.8 times bigger than Earth, orbiting HD 152843 in about 19-35 days.
The discovery was done by observing the brightness of the star over a month using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star’s brightness varied over the course of observation, every time the planets came in the satellites field of view showing a dip in intensity. This indicated that there could be at least one planet orbiting the star. However, all 15 scientists part of the project flagged at least two transits showing there were two planets orbiting the star.
To confirm the presence of two planets and the accuracy of the data, scientists used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere (HARPS-N) telescope in Spain and the Extreme Precision Spectrometer at Lowell Observatory.
Nora Eisner, a doctoral student in astrophysics at the University of Oxford said, “We’re taking baby steps towards the direction of finding an Earth-like planet and studying its atmosphere and continue to push the boundaries of what we can see.” She added that studying them together is interesting to constrain theories of how planets both form and evolve over time.
Scientists are continuing observations to confirm the mass of these two planets and are hopeful that once the James Webb Telescope, likely to be launched later this year, begins operation they will be able to peer deep and look at what kinds of molecules make up the atmosphere in this system.