TEMPO. TOGETHER, Jakarta – The astronomer is analyzing a planet the mysterious solar system is labeled as HD-207496b. This planet is 138 light years from Earth and is thought to be in the process of transformation.
Compared to Earth, this planet has a mass and radius 6.1 and 2.25 times greater. This exo planet is thought to have one of three possibilities: atmosphere gas, oceans, or a mixture of the two. Whatever it is, one thing is clear, this planet is expected to shrink to become a super-Earth.
Therefore, the characteristics of this planet can help astronomers solve the mystery of detecting planets outside the solar system. For example, the distance between a rocky planet that has a mass greater than Earth and a gas planet that is smaller than that Neptune. Exoplanets are indeed enigmatic in the characterization of their atmospheres.
Just so you know, there are all kinds of galaxies out there, lots of them planet extrasurya very different. Astronomers have so far compiled about 5,300 worlds outside the solar system. The number could be even greater because there are still nearly twice as many objects found by the same candidate.
But from the many findings, it is very rare to find exoplanets that have a size of 1.5 to 2 times the mass of Earth with shorter orbits of around 100 days. The scientists searched for it using the Southern European Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Finder (HARPS) 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The search continues by sorting candidates identified by TESS, NASA’s space planet-hunting telescope. This is what brought an international team led by astrophysicist Susana Barros from the University of Porto in Portugal to the planet HD-207496b.
TESS looks for exoplanets by looking up at the sky. Its sensitive instruments are tuned to very faint flickers in starlight that could be evidence of an orbiting exoplanet passing, or transiting, between us and the star.
If these transits occur regularly, astronomers can easily deduce the existence of an orbiting object and determine its period. If a star’s brightness is known, the depth of transit drop — how much light the star blocks — allows astronomers to calculate the radius of an orbiting object.
HARPS detects another metric. When an exoplanet orbits a star, it exerts its own gravitational pull. Whereas an exoplanet that does not orbit a star, on the contrary, the two objects will orbit the same center of mass, known as the barycenter.
Because stars are so much more massive, they don’t move much, but just wobble in place. This is what HARPS can measure. As the star wobbles toward and away from us, the wavelength of its light changes, condensing as the star approaches and stretching as it moves away.
How much the star moves depends on the mass of the exoplanet, so astronomers can also calculate that.
Once you know the mass and radius of an exoplanet, you can combine them to calculate its density. This is where it gets really interesting because density can be used to deduce what exoplanets are made of.
HARPS data reveals that HD-207496b has a mass about 6.1 times that of Earth. That means the exoplanet’s density is about 3.27 grams per cubic centimeter, which is again denser than Earth’s 5.51 grams per cubic centimeter, and implies that HD-207496b’s composition is not strictly rocky.
“We found that HD-207496b has a lower density than Earth, and therefore we suspect it has a large composition of water and/or gas,” Barros and his team wrote in a paper on exoplanets at the site. arXiv.
From there came the choice of composition to model the planet’s internal structure. “We concluded that the planet has a water-rich mantle, a gas-rich mantle, or a mixture of both.”
Evaporation modeling reveals that even if an exoplanet has a gaseous hydrogen and helium-rich atmosphere, that state is temporary. The star will completely strip the exoplanet in 520 million years, aka its atmosphere will gradually dissipate. Once the atmosphere is gone, HD-207496b becomes an open ocean world.
“In general,” the researchers write, “we predict that the planet will have water and an envelope of hydrogen or helium and fall somewhere between these two models.”
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