An international group of astronomers has reported the discovery of a new, young, hot exoplanet orbiting a distant star. The newly discovered alien world, called TOI-4862 b (or NGTS-30 b), is similar to Jupiter in size and mass. The finding was published on the preprint server on April 3. arXiv.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Search Satellite (TESS) has detected more than 7,100 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOIs), of which 432 have been confirmed. Since its launch in April 2018, the satellite has been surveying nearly 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun in search of transiting exoplanets.

Recently, a team of astronomers led by Matthew Battley from the University of Geneva in Switzerland confirmed to TOI another view of TESS. They detected a transition signal in the light curve of TOI-4862, a young G-type star located approximately 762 light-years away. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by later observations.

“NGTS-30 b/TOI-4862 b was detected for the first time in a single pass in TESS photometry before archival photometry of NGTS [Next Generation Transit Survey] and EulerCam was used to refine the planetary period,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

TOI-4862 b has a radius of 0.93 Jupiter radii and a mass of approximately 0.96 Jupiter masses. The planet orbits its host every 98.3 days in a moderately eccentric orbit (with an eccentricity of 0.294) at a distance of 0.41 AU. Due to this eccentricity, the equilibrium temperature of TOI-4862 b probably ranges from 274 to 500 K.

The parent star, TOI-4862, is a few percent smaller and less massive than the Sun, and its age is estimated to be 1.1 billion years. The effective temperature of the star is about 5455 K and its metallicity is -0.03 dex.

The resulting parameters make TOI-4862 b one of the youngest hot Jupiters discovered to date. Based on internal simulations, astronomers found that TOI-4862 b has a heavy element mass fraction of 0.23 and a heavy element abundance of 20, making it richer in metals than the host.

In summary, the authors of the article emphasized the uniqueness of TOI-4862 b and recommended further research on this interesting extrasolar world.

“The star’s 1.1 billion-year age makes NGTS-30 b/TOI-4862 b one of the youngest hot Jupiters found and adds an important new framework for understanding the evolutionary scale of such planets. “Further observations will help determine more deeply the history of migration and the composition of this interesting system.” scientists conclude.