A team of astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has discovered an exoplanet that will delight math fans. It is a planet the size of the Earth that orbits its star every … 3.14 days; that is, the approximation of π (pi), the ratio of the circumference to the radius of a circle.
The researchers named this distant world “π Earth”, although its official name is K2-315b. E l exoplaneta was identified by the K2 mission area Kepler telescope NASA and detection was confirmed using spéculoos, a network of terrestrial telescopes.
The terrestrial exoplanet whose mass is 0.809 Earths orbits an M-type star (a cold low-mass star with about a fifth of the mass of our star, the Sun) and, as we say, it takes 3.14 days to complete. an orbit to its host star. Its orbit is very narrow and it revolves around its star at 81 kilometers per second.
“The planet is beating like clockwork,” says Prajwal Niraula, of MIT’s Division of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), who led the article published in The Astronomical Journal.
“Everybody wants to enjoy a little lately”, comments Julien de Wit, about the title of the article and the idea of naming this world as Planet Pi.
Despite being the size of our planet (its radius is 0.95 that of Earth), K2-315b is not a twin of Earth . Experts suspect that K2-315b is terrestrial but not habitable. Its temperature, due to its proximity to its star, seems to be around 180 ° C, so it is too hot to be habitable, according to our current concept (although great for baking a cake).
Despite this, this Planet Pi could rise as a promising candidate to know the features of its atmosphere, which could be very interesting. The funny thing is that, even with the distance from its star, it is not a molten world, thanks to the fact that the star is quite cold.
Where is it located?
K2-315b is located 186 light years from Earth. Although astronomers do not expect to find life on this planet, it is still interesting to study it. The planet may possess an atmosphere that could potentially be observed , helping researchers learn more about the large rocky worlds around small stars.
“We will discover more interesting planets in the future, just in time for the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope designed to probe the atmosphere of these alien worlds,” says Niraula. “With better algorithms, hopefully one day we will be able to search for smaller planets, even as small as Mars.”
Referencia: Prajwal Niraula, Julien de Wit, Benjamin V. Rackham, Elsa Ducrot, Artem Burdanov, Ian J. M. Crossfield, Valérie Van Grootel, Catriona Murray, Lionel J. Garcia, Roi Alonso, Corey Beard, Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew, Laetitia Delrez, Brice-Olivier Demory, Benjamin J. Fulton, Michaël Gillon, Maximilian N. Günther, Andrew W. Howard, Howard Issacson, Emmanuël Jehin, Peter P. Pedersen, Francisco J. Pozuelos, Didier Queloz, Rafael Rebolo-López, Sairam Lalitha, Daniel Sebastian, Samantha Thompson, Amaury H. M. J. Triaud. π Earth: A 3.14 day Earth-sized Planet from K2’s Kitchen Served Warm by the SPECULOOS Team. The Astronomical Journal, 2020; 160 (4): 172 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aba95f
