Three ‘Missing-Link’ Planets Were Discovered Circling a Nearby Star by the New TESS Spacecraft

Planets are like puppies—they come in all kinds of sizes, all kinds of colors and they’re often found in litters. That’s not the way things used to seem. It wasn’t until 1992 that the first known planet orbiting a star other than our sun was confirmed. In the years since, the exoplanet population has exploded, thanks mostly to the Kepler Space Telescope, which went aloft in 2009 and, before it at last went off-line in 2018, had discovered 2,345 confirmed exoplanets and identified another 2,420 candidates still awaiting confirmation. Now, a successor to Kepler has made its own mark. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, investigators announced the discovery of a trifecta of new planets in a single go, all of them orbiting a star just 73 light years from Earth—or one town over on the scale of the universe. What’s more, two of the planets are a sort of cosmic equivalent of an evolutionary missing link, with a size and mass that lands in between those of the planets in our own solar system. While Kepler’s planetary haul was huge, many of the worlds it discovered lie thousands of light years from Earth. With a single light year measuring 5.88 trillion miles, it’s hard to determine much about any of the new worlds except their diameter, mass and the speed at which they orbit their parent star. That’s not nothing: all of those metrics can allow astronomers to determine the planets’ temperature and likely makeup—...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized exobiology exoplanets James Webb Space Telescope Kepler Space Telescope NASA TESS Source Type: news