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Scientists using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, recently awake from a sleep intended to conserve a valuable fuel, found Wolf 503b, an exoplanet about twice the size of the Earth, just 145 light-years away of the constellation of the Virgin.
The team involved includes Canadian, American and German researchers. The lead author of the study is Merrin Peterson, a graduate student of the Exoplanets Research Institute, who recently began working at the MA at the University of Montreal.
Size comparison: Earth, Wolf 503b and Neptune. The blue color for Wolf 503b is imaginary; nothing is still known about the atmosphere and the surface of the planet. Credit: NASA Goddard / Robert Simmon (Earth), NASA / JPL (Neptune).
"The discovery and confirmation of this new exoplanet have been very fast, thanks to the collaboration with my advisor Björn Benneke and myself," Peterson said. "In May, when the latest version of Kepler K2's data arrived, we quickly launched a program that allowed us to find as many interesting exoplanets as possible." Wolf 503b was one of them. "
The planet was found by observing the changes in light that the dwarf star (named, of course, Wolf 503) presents as the planet passes before it; as Wolf 503b rotates around its sun every six days and is about 10 times closer to its sun than our planet Mercury is no longer ours, the effect it creates on the light of this star is easily perceptible by a Kepler telescope.
(Anecdote of the day: Mercury revolves around our own Sun in 88 days.)
It's precisely because of Kepler that we know this: most planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, this orbit close to their stars as 503b usually has its size – somewhere between the Earth and Neptune, four times plus size of the earth.
Impression of the artist of the exoplanet Wolf 503b and its star host. Image Credit: Sci-News.com
We have nothing like the 503b in our solar system, so it's a rare opportunity to study such a planet and determine whether these types of planetary bodies are probably rocky and Earth-like, or more gaseous, like Neptune. Because the star around 503b is relatively close to us, it's very bright; this will allow a more detailed study and inferences on its density and mass. If the indications indicate that the planet is of higher mass, having calculated its radius using telescopic data similar to the light, this will give the researchers an approximate density of the planet, which will inform them of its composition. In other words, a denser, higher-mass planet would probably be rocky like the Earth, and a much less dense and gassy composition, like Neptune, would place 503b in this category.
A woman stands near a model of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on April 2, 2015. AFP PHOTO / JIM WATSON (Photo Credit JIM WATSON / AFP / Getty Images)
As Kepler reaches the end of its effective life cycle, a new telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is launched in early 2021 to replace it at a time and, after working there for a while, Hubbell; it will be easier to study planets such as 503B, including chemical composition such as hydrogen and water.
"The brightness of the host star makes the Wolf 503b a prime target for fast tracking of radial velocity, Hubble Space Telescope transit spectroscopy, as well as detailed atmospheric characterization with JWST," astronomers said. .
Speaking of JWST, here are the top 5 things about it:
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