Astronomers from Canterbury University have discovered an incredibly rare super-earths, which is one of the few, has almost earthly in size and orbit.
a Brief report about the discovery is published on the website of Canterbury University, and the full study can be found in the journal of the Astronomical Journal.
an Incredibly rare is the opening called the lead author, Dr. Antonio Herrera Martin. He explained that the planet was discovered with the help of technology gravitational microlensing.
the Essence of the method lies in the fact that astronomers are continuously watching any star. They carefully fix the shadows flickering on its background, and then analyze them and find the objects when moving in its orbit periodically block the light.
to Find the planet this method can be extremely rare. In this case scientists call super-earths revealed “one in a million”. They watched the star for five days. Same planet, in question, was only discovered during a five-hour “distortion of light”.
“Only after confirmation that this distortion was really caused by another “body” that is different from a mistake of the instrument, we have started receiving and studying the characteristics of the system “star-planet”, – said Martin.
as a reference for comparison, the scientists took our Solar system. According to their calculations, the mass of open super-earths is in the range between the masses of Earth and Neptune. And its orbit ranges between the orbits of our planet and Venus.
researchers came to the conclusion that the mass of the star in this system is 10-12 percent of the mass of our Sun. This allowed us to calculate that the year on the new super-earths should have about 617 days. In any case, this is one of the few currently known planets outside the Solar system, the size and which orbit close to the earth.
we Add that the so-called microlensing event was recorded in 2018 and received the designation of OGLE-2018-BLG-0677. It was independently detected by several telescopes around the world.
In particular, scientists from the University of Canterbury analyzed the data obtained by three identical telescopes in Chile, Australia and South Africa. They are equipped with very large and sensitive cameras, which allows you to measure light emission from 100 million stars every 15 minutes.
there were only 3000 microlensing events, which were then analyzed by scientists.
