Astronomers have discovered a satellite of an exoplanet that is much larger than Earth

13 January 2022, 21:15 | Technologies
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An international team of scientists has found evidence of the existence of a new celestial body in the data of the Kepler telescope. It's a moon of a giant exoplanet so big it's likely a super-Earth or warm Neptune, reports Naked science..

Super-Earths and warm Neptunes are called planets that are significantly larger than ours.. But in this case we are talking about satellite exoplanets, which are usually smaller than planets..

The celestial body was designated Kepler-1708 b-i. The planet's mother, Kepler-1708, is a sun-like star.. Jupiter-like planet Kepler-1708 b orbits at a distance 1.6 times greater than the distance from Earth to the Sun.

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The planet was discovered by the transit method, that is, scientists noticed that the luminosity of a star periodically drops by the same amount. A careful study of the luminosity graph showed that there are still some fluctuations at the depression in it, which corresponds to the passage of the planet.. Careful analysis showed that these fluctuations can be caused by the presence of a satellite near the planet, and quite a large one at that..

To test this assumption, scientists conducted simulations that showed that the probability of a discovery being wrong is 1%.. That is, the researchers managed to find one of the most reliable candidates for exoplanet satellites..

The diameter of Kepler-1708 b-i is approximately 2.61 times that of the earth. It rotates at a distance of about a million kilometers from the host planet, that is, it should occupy a huge part of the visible sky on it.

The question of whether the satellite is habitable remains open.. A sufficiently massive body 240 million kilometers from a star like the Sun can be habitable if it has a sufficiently dense atmosphere. With dimensions 2.61 times larger than Earth's, Kepler-1708 b-i may indeed have a dense atmosphere, and possibly a magnetic field.

The combination of both can give the planet not only an acceptable temperature for life, but also protection from the radiation rings of its huge host planet..

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Earlier, scientists from the Institute for Astronomy of the Max Planck Society discovered an Earth-like planet near a red dwarf not far from the Sun, which managed to preserve its atmosphere.. It could help scientists study the atmospheres of other worlds.




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