An international group of astronomers, with the help of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has discovered a new ultra-short-period exoplanet. The newly discovered alien world, called Wolf 327 b, is slightly larger than Earth and is about 2.5 times larger. The discovery was reported in an article published on the preprint server on January 22. arXiv.

To date, TESS has detected more than 7,000 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 415 have been confirmed. Since its launch in April 2018, the spacecraft has been surveying some 200,000 of the brightest stars closest to the Sun to find exoplanets that range from small rocky worlds to gas giants.

A team of astronomers led by Felipe Murgas from the University of La Laguna, Spain, confirmed that another TOI had observed TESS. According to a recently published study, the transition signal was identified in the light curve of Wolff 327, a nearby M dwarf star. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by subsequent photometry, high-resolution imaging, and radial velocity (RV) measurements.

“Detection of transit events was conducted by NASA’s TESS mission, and ground-based observations confirmed that transit events occurred on the star Wolf 327. Further RV measurements with the CARMENES spectrograph allowed us to determine the mass of the candidate and confirm its planetary nature,” he writes. researchers.

Wolf 327 b has a radius of 1.24 Earth radii and a measured mass of 2.53 Earth masses, giving a mass density of 7.24 g/cm.³. The planet orbits its host star at a distance of about 0.01 AU every 13.7 hours, and its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be about 1000 K. Therefore, Murgas’ team classified Wolf 327 b as an ultrashort-period (USP) superstar. Soil.

The results show that Wolf 327 b is a rocky planet with an internal composition similar to Mercury. Astronomers suggest that this exoplanet has a significant iron core surrounded by a small mantle layer and a negligible hydrogen-helium atmosphere.

As for Wolf 327, it is a 4.1 billion-year-old M dwarf of spectral type M2.5 V, located about 93 light-years away. The star is only 40% the size and mass of the Sun, its effective temperature is 3542 K, and its metallicity is estimated at about -0.17 dex.

The authors of the paper summarizing the results say that this is an interesting addition to USP’s known pattern of planets orbiting M-dwarf stars, due to its interesting internal structure and measurements suitable for detecting secondary transits with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). . ). According to the authors, given that USPs are often found in multi-planet systems, there is a high probability that Wolff 327 will also orbit other planets.