(ORDO NEWS) — Using NASA‘s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered the brown dwarf.
This newly discovered object, designated TOI-2119b, appears to be about the size of Jupiter but has a mass about 60 times that of the solar system’s most massive planet.
Brown dwarfs are intermediate-mass objects between planets and stars, ranging in mass from 13 to 80 Jupiter masses. Although quite a few brown dwarfs are known by now, systems in which a brown dwarf orbits another star are very rare.
In a new study, a team of astronomers led by Theron W. Carmichael of the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, report the discovery of another brown dwarf transiting an M-type dwarf. To date, scientists have only known eight systems of this class.
Carmichael’s team used the TESS satellite to observe a nearby active M-type dwarf known as TOI-2119, which lies about 103.7 light-years from Earth. A transiting signal was detected in the star’s light curve, and an additional observational campaign confirmed that the transiting object is a brown dwarf.
The object TOI-2119b has a radius of 1.08 Jupiter radii, while its mass is estimated at 64.4 Jupiter masses. It revolves around the parent star with a period of 7.2 days, remaining at a distance of about 0.06 astronomical units (1 AU is equal to the average distance from the Earth to the Sun) from it.
The brown dwarf’s orbit has an eccentricity of 0.337 and is tilted at an angle of 88.4 degrees. The effective temperature of this object is 2030 Kelvin.
The parent star TOI-2119 is about the same size and mass as the Sun, but its luminosity is barely 0.04 that of the Sun. The effective temperature of the star is estimated at 3621 Kelvin, and the age is approximately 2.14 billion years.
In summary, the authors note that TOI-2119b could have formed in a tight orbit with a high eccentricity, or in a wide orbit far from the star it is currently migrating inward from. The authors note that both scenarios seem possible, therefore, additional studies of the system are required for the correct choice.
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