NASA Ames / SETI Institute / JPL-Caltech
The newly discovered planet, Kepler-725C, seems to have “carpenter bugs.” This huge “super terra” does not stop entering and leaving its habitable zone.
A huge “super terra” was discovered with an extreme climate that makes it habitable only during a part of its orbit.
It’s called Kepler-725c and orbits a star at 2,472 light years away. The most notable is that it was discovered without even being detected directly.
As the study details last week in Nature Astronomythis discovery of the exoplanet is due to something called Traffic Time Variations (TTVS).
Oma of the main ways of discovering exoplanets is looking for when they move, or pass in front of their star. This is how the most successful exoplanet hunter to date, NASA’s Kepler space telescope, discovered more than 3300 confirmed exoplanets and thousands of other candidates.
However, as explained, there are disadvantages in the detection of exoplanets through transits. One is that the technique aims to planets in short orbits near its star, which means they move more often and are easier to see.
Trough also require precise alignment between the orbital plane of a planetary system and our line of vision. Even a small slope can mean that we cannot see the planets in wider orbits to transit.
Often, however, we cannot see the planet that is causing the variations, but the size and frequency of TTVs can tell us the orbital period and the mass of these hidden worlds.
One of these planets that has been found to have TTVs is the Kepler-725B. It’s a planet gaseous giant that orbits a yellow star similar to the sun and was discovered by the extinct Kepler spacecraft.
“When analyzing the Kepler-725B TTV signals, a giant planet with a period of 39.64 days in the same system, the team was able to successfully infer the mass and orbital parameters of the Kepler-725C hidden planet,” said the investigation leader, said the investigation leader Sun Leileiof the Yunnan Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in.
The Kepler-725C mass is quite significant- 10 times larger than the mass of the earth. This places it in the upper echelon of a type of planet called super-terra-giant, probably rocky worlds.
We don’t have an example of a super terrace in our solar system, so we don’t really know what these planets are like.
Already the orbit of the planet is unusual. It is highly elliptical, with an eccentricity of 0.44. For comparison, the orbit of the earth has an eccentricity of 0.0167 and is therefore almost circular; At the other extreme, an orbital eccentricity of 1 would be parabolic. Kepler-7825C orbit has an oval shapewhich means that in some parts of your orbit is much closer to your star than at other times.
As Space.com writes, the high orbital eccentricity means that the Exoplanet only passes part of its orbit in the habitable zonewhich is a circular area around the star at a distance where temperatures are suitable for liquid water on the surface of a planet.
Do you want to say that the Kepler-725C is only habitable during a part of your 207.5 day land? What would happen to any life that could exist on the planet during the periods when it is outside the habitable zone? Once again, these are theoretical problems that scientists have debated.
For now, we can’t know what’s going on there. However, the existence of the Kepler-725C makes them suddenly “much more real” problems.
“The discovery of the Kepler-725C demonstrates the potential of the TTV technique to detect low mass planets in housing areas of sun-like stars,” Sun said.
In doing so, The TTV method will help promote the search for life in the universethe more it is not providing more statistics on the number of planets in habitable zones.
