The discovery of this unusual planet has been made by a team of Indian scientists. This is the first time they have found a planet that orbits a star very similar to the Sun. Those responsible for the discovery are a group of scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) of Ahmedabad in India.
The planet has been christened EPIC 211945201b or K2-236b and is quite large, about 27 times more massive than Earth. This discovery places India among the small group of countries that confirm the existence of a planet outside our solar system.
Locating exoplanets is no longer an extraordinary event today. In fact, the existence of more than 3,700 has already been confirmed, however, the vast majority (about 2,600) have been detected and confirmed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
This newly discovered planet was also detected by Kepler as a possible planet candidate, but it was a team of Indian scientists who effectively confirmed that it was a planet , rather than simply a comet or other astronomical object (which is the difficult part). .
Experts spent a year and a half at PRL’s Gurushikhar Observatory in Mount Abu, India, studying changes in light from the planet’s host star, EPIC 211945201, or K2-236, and making independent confirmation of its mass. .
“We present here strong evidence of a sub Saturn around EPIC 211945201 and confirm its planetary nature ,” reports the team in The Astronomical Journal that includes the study.
Characteristics of the new planet
– The planet orbits a star similar to the Sun, but is more than seven times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, which means that the temperature could be around 600 ºC and probably too hot and dry to support life.
– As a consequence, a year on this planet lasts approximately 19.5 days.
– It has a mass around 27 times that of the Earth and its radius is estimated to be six times greater.
– The planet orbits a star similar to the Sun 600 light years away.
“However, K2 photometric data combined with false positive probability calculations were not sufficient to confirm the planetary nature of the system. Therefore, an independent measurement of body mass was necessary for the discovery, which was made by the PARAS spectrograph , “comment the authors.
Although there is little chance of finding signs of life on K2-236b, astronomers note that their discovery is highly significant because it may help astronomers discover more details about how planets of this class (super-Neptune or sub-Saturn) are able to form so close to their host star.
Reference: Evidence of a Sub-Saturn around EPIC 211945201 Abhijit Chakraborty1, Arpita Roy2, Rishikesh Sharma1, Suvrath Mahadevan3,4, Priyanka Chaturvedi1, Neelam JSS V Prasad1, and BG Anandarao1 Published 2018 June 8 • © 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. The Astronomical Journal, Volume 156, Number 1
Image credit: ISRO
Comparison of the planet discovered by Indian scientists with our planet, Earth (ISRO).
