(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers have found a gas planet, previously hidden from observation. The planet TOI-2180 b has the same diameter as Jupiter, but is three times heavier than it.
The researchers also believe that it contains 105 Earth masses and is much closer to it than similar planets.
The study is published in the Astronomical Journal. According to scientists, this is a special space object.
The planet has an orbit of 261 days, is located 379 light-years from Earth (which is close for an exoplanet), and its star is very bright and scientists can watch it pass through its field.
Curiously, the discovery was made with the help of amateur astronomers who take publicly available data from NASA satellites such as TESS and scan them to notice the planet’s transits at regular intervals from each other.
They are similar to the extinction, the dip in brightness at the moment the planet passes in front of the star. To make sure that these are precisely transits, you need to fix three such phenomena.
Thus, a group of observers informed astronomer Paul Dalba of the University of California at Riverside about one such transit, and his team began to observe the gravitational attraction of the planet to the star.
To see the second transit, the scientist organized observation from 14 different telescopes on three different continents.
And, although 20,000 images were taken as a result of such activities, none of them gave a clear image of the planet. Now scientists hope that the planet will be able to see in February, when it will again pass by its star.
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