(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers announces the discovery of a new gas giant using NASA‘s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
The exoplanet, designated TOI-3235 b, is the size of Jupiter. It orbits its parent star in less than three days.
TESS is currently surveying some 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to look for transiting exoplanets.
So far, it has identified over 6,100 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOIs), of which about 3,000 have already been confirmed.
A team of astronomers led by Melissa J. Hobson of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, recently confirmed another planet tracked by TESS.
The researchers report that a transit signal has been detected in the light curve of the M dwarf TOI-3235.
The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by subsequent radial velocity measurements and ground-based photometric observations.
TOI-3235 b has a radius of approximately 1.02 Jupiter radii and its mass has been measured as 0.66 Jupiter masses, giving a density of 0.78 g/cm3.
The planet revolves around its star every 2.59 days at a distance of about 0.027 AU. The equilibrium temperature of TOI-3235 b is estimated at 604 K.
The parent star, believed to be about 400 million years old, is an M dwarf of the spectral subclass M4 with a radius of about 0.37 solar radii and a mass of about 0.39 solar masses.
TOI-3235 has an effective temperature of 3.389 K and a metallicity of 0.26 dex. The distance to the star is estimated at about 236 light years.
Astronomers noted that TOI-3235 b is a peculiar extrasolar world, since current models of planet formation do not predict the existence of gas giants around low-mass stars like TOI-3235.
The researchers believe that the formation of TOI-3235 b required either an extremely high formation efficiency or a very massive disk.
According to the authors of the article, TOI-3235 b is suitable for studies of atmospheric characteristics.
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