belbalady.net Astronomers report the discovery of two new exoplanets orbiting a sun-like star 175 light-years away.
The newly discovered alien worlds, known as HIP 104045 b and HIP 104045 c, have been classified as analogues of Jupiter and the superplanet Neptune, respectively.
The discovery is detailed in a paper published March 2 on arXiv ahead of print. The radial velocity (RV) method for exoplanet detection relies on detecting variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull of an unseen exoplanet as it rotates. about the star.
Thanks to this technique, more than 600 exoplanets have been discovered so far. A team of astronomers from scientific institutions in Brazil, the United States and Italy, led by Tiago Ferreira of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, reported the discovery of two new exoplanets using this radial velocity method. .
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They observed that the two outer planets orbit a solar-type star called HIP 104045, only 175 light-years from Earth.
They were able to spot the star using the HARPS High Resolution Radial Velocity Planet Finder, attached to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope in La Silla, Chile.
The observations, made as part of the Solar Twin Planet Search (STPS) program, led to the discovery of the two massive worlds outside the solar system.
“In this paper, we present the discovery of two planets in the HIP 104045 system: the first is HIP 104045 c, a super-Neptune located near the star, and the second is HIP 104045 b, the Jupiter analogue orbiting the observed sun-like star,” the team wrote. Using the ESO/HARPS spectrometer of the STPS program, plus additional campaigns, make up nearly 13 years of observations.”
HIP 104045 b has a minimum mass of about 0.5 Jupiter masses (159 Earth masses) and orbits its host star every 2,315 days, at a distance of about 3.46 astronomical units.
And when it comes to HIP 104045 c, its mass is no less than 0.136 Jupiter masses (43.2 Earth masses) and its orbital period is 316 days, which makes it closer to its parent star at a distance of about 0.92 astronomical units.
Scientists explained that HIP 104045 is the main sequence star (a statistical line of stars that constitutes about 80% of the various stars in the universe), and it is a relatively bright dwarf that is not reddish because it did not consume all the hydrogen in its core. It is also of spectral type G5V, with a size and mass slightly greater than our Sun. Its effective temperature is 5,826 K (5,552,850 °C), and it is as old as our Sun, with an estimated age of 4.5 billion years (while the Sun is estimated to be 4.57 billion years old).
Astronomers have noted that HIP 104045 exhibits great similarity to the Sun in terms of the pattern and abundance of chemicals, which has a lower amount of refractory/volatile elements when compared to its solar twins.
Scientists hypothesize that based on the thermal composition of HIP 104045 (which falls between those of the heat-refractory Sun and most of its heat-rich solar twins) means that it may have swallowed some rocky planetary material.
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