Astronomers photograph the closest exoplanet ever found

Graduate student at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, USA Discover extrasolar planet With a straight image, this is the closest thing to Earth has ever been discovered. his name was Coconut-2b.

According to the study, conducted jointly with an international team of astronomers, the celestial body said It is located only 35 light-years away and has a mass six times the mass of Jupiter. It is about 800 million years old, and is relatively young.

As mentioned earlier, previously named COCONUTS-2b, Because it revolves around a red dwarf star low mass called Coconut -2. It is a massive and relatively cold gas giant.

Coconut -2 B It is located at about 6,471 astronomical units, which is 6,471 times the average distance between them ground and the sun from its host star. Second, Its orbital period is about 1.1 million years.

About your temperatureIt turns out to be cold enough to be considered a gas giant. An exoplanet achieves a mood of about 434 Kelvin, 161 Grados Celsius Almost, despite being very far from the star.

It comes from residual heat that is also given off by planet formation, Which makes it glow faintly at infrared wavelengths, just enough to be noticeable in direct images.

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energy produced It’s exactly “more than a million times weaker than the sun.”. This is why an orb can only be detected using infrared light that has a lower energy spectrum.

Zhoujian Zhang, lead author of the new study published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, Text: “With a massive planet in a very wide orbit, and an extremely cold central star, COCONUTS-2 It is very different from Solar System“.

“Direct detection and study of the light emitted by gas giant planets around other stars is very difficult, because the planets we find tend to have close orbits. Buried in the flames of light‘, he finished.

10 years before this investigation, more precisely in 2011, the satellite Wide Field Infrared Scan Detector He managed to absorb it. but nevertheless, It was thought to be a floating body that did not orbit a star.

JFG / ED