(ORDO NEWS) — The TESS space telescope has discovered a new exoplanet – the hot gas giant TOI-778 b in orbit around a dwarf star, which is rapidly rotating around its axis.
To search for exoplanets, you can track the slight fluctuations in the luminosity of distant stars – periodic changes that are associated with the passage of the planet in their background.
This work is carried out by the NASA TESS space telescope , observing more than 200 thousand stars relatively close to us.
Since 2018, it has discovered about 6,100 candidate planets. Of these, 282 have been confirmed, including a potentially habitable planet covered in an ocean of water.
A new exoplanet in the TESS data has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Jake Clark of the University of South Queensland in Australia.
Like most planets found by the transit method, TOI-778 b is a hot Jupiter , a gas giant that is very close to its star.
Unusual in this tandem is the star TOI-778 itself, which is distinguished by its rapid rotation around its axis.
According to the authors of the work, the gas giant TOI-778 b is 1.37 times larger than Jupiter and 2.8 times heavier than it.
The planet’s orbit is only 0.06 of the Earth‘s orbit, and it takes only 4.63 days to complete an annual revolution.
With such proximity to the star, TOI-778 b is very hot: the temperature on it reaches 1300 ° C. All this makes the planet a full-fledged hot Jupiter.
Its parent star TOI-778 is curious. It is located 530 light-years away and is an F dwarf . Such stars are slightly larger than yellow dwarfs, similar to the Sun, slightly brighter and hotter than it.
TOI-778 is 1.7 times larger than our star and 1.4 times more massive; its age is estimated at less than two billion years.
At the same time, the star rotates around its axis unusually quickly, making a complete revolution in just 2.6 days. For comparison, the Sun rotates in 27 days.
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