In their search for potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, researchers using NASA’s TESS satellite have discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting a young protostar. At only about three million years old, it is the youngest transiting exoplanet yet discovered.
The giant planet with the tricky catalog name IRAS 04125+2902 b (also called TIDYE-1 b) is a baby from an astronomical perspective. According to astronomers, its discovery was due to an extraordinary stroke of luck. The star around which the planet orbits is still surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, but for unknown reasons it is aligned completely differently from the planet’s orbit, the researchers report in the journal Nature.
Planet is about the size of Jupiter
TIDYE-1 b is about the diameter of Jupiter, but has only about 30 percent of its mass and takes just 8.83 days to orbit its central star. Using multiple telescopes, the researchers determined the age of the star at 3.3 million years, meaning that this may also be the maximum age of the planet.
What confuses astronomers is the orientation of the star’s protoplanetary disk (a disk of gas and dust; note), which has a completely different orientation than the planet TIDYE-1. The tilt of the disk around the sun IRAS 04125+2902 remains a mystery for the time being and, according to the scientists, will probably only be clarified through further observations.
The size of a refrigerator, four cameras
TESS (the abbreviation stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is about the size of a refrigerator and is equipped with four cameras. Like its predecessor, the ‘Kepler’ telescope, the observatory observes the light of certain stars in space.
TESS, whose mission began in April 2018, aims to find both small rocky planets and giant celestial bodies – in total covering a significantly larger area than the Kepler Space Telescope. For example, TESS observes the light of certain stars. If this fades for a moment, it could mean that a planet has passed by.
Source: Krone
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