(ORDO NEWS) — Using NASA‘s Kepler spacecraft and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a new Earth-sized exoplanet located about 70 light-years from the sun.
Planet K2-415b is at least three times as massive as Earth. Kepler has discovered more than 2,600 exoplanets to date.
After the failure of two reaction wheels in 2013, the mission was renamed K2 to perform high-precision photometry of individual fields in the ecliptic. The revived spacecraft operated until November 2018.
As for TESS, the spacecraft is currently surveying about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to look for transiting exoplanets.
So far, it has identified more than 6,100 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOIs), of which about 3,000 have been confirmed so far
. originally identified by the K2 mission in the light curve of the dwarf star K2-415, has been confirmed by TESS observations.
Observations have shown that K2-415b has a radius of approximately 1.015 Earth radii and an estimated mass of 3.0 Earth masses.
The planet revolves around its parent star every 4.018 days at a distance of about 0.027 AU. The equilibrium temperature of K2-415b is estimated at about 400 K.
The parent star K2-415 belongs to the spectral type M5V. Its effective temperature was 3173 K. Its radius is approximately 0.2 solar radii and its mass is approximately 0.16 solar masses.
The authors of the paper emphasized that K2-415b is a potential target for future exploration of Earth-like planets.
“The 22 pc distance and moderate transit depth make K2-415 a good target for future observations, including further RV monitoring (for example, to search for additional planets) and transit spectroscopy,” the researchers concluded.
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