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When Merrin Peterson began her MSc in physics at the University of Montreal last year, she could not have predicted that she would discover a whole new exoplanet in such a short time.
"It was very exciting," she said. "My supervisor likes to call my planet because I wrote the newspaper and I did my best to work on it."
"But it was really a team discovery."
According to NASA, there are planetary objects orbiting almost all the stars visible in the sky.
These planets orbiting other stars than our sun are called exoplanets and can take many shapes and sizes.
Some are frozen. Some are hot. Depending on how close they are to their star, the closest ones can complete orbit – essentially marking the year of this exoplanet – in just a few days.
The Peterson exoplanet calls Wolf 503b. It is twice as big as the Earth, but it only takes six days to cover its own star.
How did Peterson and his team from the University's Exoplanets Research Institute (iREx) find them?
Alongside Professor Björn Benneke's assistant, Peterson took the data from NASA's Kepler telescope and performed it in a computer program to help identify potential exoplanets.
In the search for distant celestial bodies, it is almost like looking for something that does not exist, Peterson said.
"When you find it right away, you have found that there is something that blocks the light of the star," she said.
From this information, you can find the exoplanet radius and its mass and calculate the time required for the exoplanet to orbit the star.
There are many exoplanets of the same size – indeed, many of those found in the Milky Way using the Kepler telescope in recent years that revolve around their stars are about equal to Wolf503b.
Since there are no planets of this size in our solar system, astronomers are not sure that exoplanets like Wolf503b are rocky or gaseous.
Many researchers in the field are motivated by the goal of finding what Peterson calls "an analogue of the Earth," in other words, a planet capable of supporting an atmosphere like ours and liquid water.
But for Peterson, whose interest in astrophysics was sparked off as an undergraduate student at McGill, the opportunity to study these new pieces of the puzzle is a reward.
"It's a booming field that is generating a lot of excitement among people, and it's growing," she said. "Most of us just want to be able to study these planets in more detail than now."
The details of the discovery were published in the astronomical journal this summer.
With files from Alain Labelle of Radio-Canada
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