Astronomers discovered three sisters of the Earth, revolving around the star L 98-59. Analyzing the data of the recently launched NASA exoplanet hunter, astronomers found three stony, similar in size to the Earth planet, orbiting a red dwarf in the zone of Venus.
We report the discovery by TESS of three earth-sized exoplanets living in a bright red dwarf orbit 35 light-years from the Sun.
The main goal of the NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope, which was launched in April 2018 and replaced the Kepler veteran, who completed his research career in November last year, is the search for potentially habitable worlds in red dwarf systems. Like its predecessor, TESS searches for exoplanets by the transit method, fixing tiny dips in the luminosity of target stars.
The newly discovered worlds revolve around the star L 98-59, which is 40 percent colder and more than three times smaller and lighter than our Sun. The system is very compact – all three sisters of our planet fit between 3 and 7 million kilometers from their red dwarf (for comparison, Mercury is 58 million kilometers away from the Sun). Exoplanet radii range from 0.7 to 1.37 Earth radii, and the years they last from 2.25 to 7.45 Earth days.
Perhaps all the planets in the system are analogues of Venus in terms of their atmospheric evolution. Venus has several similarities with the Earth, including composition, size and mass. And, although in the past conditions on Venus could be moderate, in the end it turned from the planet’s habitable life and turned into a huge greenhouse with high pressure and temperature, as well as a predominance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In search of life, the authors note, it is necessary to understand why the Earth eventually became habitable and Venus does not exist, and finding its analogues in order to study their atmospheres in detail, for example, using the future NASA telescope James Webb, is crucial in disclosing this mystery.
However, today most of the potential analogues of Venus candidates found around relatively weak stars, so the discovery of planets in the star L 98-59, which receive 4-22 times more energy than the Earth from the Sun, and the Venus zone falls, will help to find out how a favorable climate can become a real hell with time.
The newly discovered worlds revolve around the star L 98-59
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