An international team of astronomers has used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to discover a new hot, bloated “super-Neptune” exoplanet. The newly found planet, named TOI-2498 b, is approximately six times larger and 35 times more massive than Earth. The discovery was published on May 16 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
TESS is currently conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets, ranging from small rocky worlds to gaseous giants. So far, it has identified nearly 6,600 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 331 have been confirmed to date.
During its primary mission, TESS observed one of the stars, TOI-2498 (also known as TIC-263179590), which is a G-type solar-type star about 26% larger and 12% more massive than the sun. TESS monitored TOI-2498 between December 12, 2018, and January 6, 2019, which resulted in the detection of a transit signal in its light curve. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up spectroscopic and photometric observations conducted by astronomers led by Ginger Frame of the University of Warwick, UK.
“In this work, we have presented the discovery of a hot, bloated super-Neptune transiting a G type star. Our analysis includes photometry from TESS sector 6 and sector 33, follow-up ground-based photometry from LCOGT and spectroscopy from HARPS,” the researchers wrote.
The newly found planet has a radius of about 6.06 Earth radii and an estimated mass of 34.62 Earth masses, yielding a density of 0.86 g/cm3. It orbits its host star every 3.74 days, at a distance of approximately 0.05 AU from it. The planet’s equilibrium temperature was calculated to be about 1,443 K.
2023-05-25 23:00:03
Article from phys.org