A giant fluffy planet orbiting a cool red dwarf star

« Traditionally, it has been difficult to form giant planets around red dwarfs, » says Shubham Kanudia, a researcher at the Carnegie Earth Institute and Planetary Laboratory and first author of the paper published in the journal. astronomical magazine« So far, this has only been observed with small samples from Doppler surveys, which usually find giant planets far from these red dwarfs. So far, we don’t have a large enough sample of planets to get close enough to gaseous planets…to find them way more. Energy.

There are still unexplained mysteries surrounding TOI-3757 b, the biggest of which is how a gas giant, especially a low-density planet, could form around a red dwarf star. However, the Kanodia team believes they may have a solution to this mystery.

The Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-Noir Lab (WIYN) 3.5-meter telescope from Kit Peak National Observatory (KPNO), an NSF NOIRLab program, monitors the Milky Way as it expands from the horizon. The reddish glow of air, which is a normal phenomenon, also colors the horizon. KPNO is located in the Arizona Sonoran Desert in the Tohono O’Odham Nation, and this clear view of part of the plane of the Milky Way shows the favorable conditions in this environment needed to observe faint celestial bodies. These conditions, which include low levels of light pollution, dark skies above 20 degrees, and dry weather conditions, have allowed researchers at the WIYN consortium to use galaxies, nebulae and exoplanets, as well as many other astronomical targets. The WIYN telescope has a length of 3.5 meters and its sister telescope has the 0.9 meter WIYN telescope. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks

They suggest that the extremely low density of TOI-3757 b may be due to two factors. The first refers to the rocky core of the planet; Gas giants are thought to start out as massive rocky cores with a mass about ten times the mass of Earth, at which point they rapidly pull in large amounts of nearby gas to form the gas giants we see today. TOI-3757b has a lower abundance of heavy elements than other gas giant M-dwarfs, so the rocky core forms more slowly, delaying the onset of gas buildup, affecting the planet’s overall density.

Another factor may be the planet’s orbit, which is currently thought to be slightly elliptical. Sometimes it gets closer to its star than at other times, generating enough extra heat to cause the planet’s atmosphere to swell.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Research Satellite,

« data-gt-translate-attributes = »[{« attribute= » »>tess[{« attribute= » »>tess][{« attribute= » »>tess[{« attribute= » »>tess) The first to see the planet. The Kanodia team made follow-up observations using ground-based instruments including NEID and NESI (NN-Explore Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager), both mounted on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope; Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) on the Hobby Eberle Telescope; and the Red Butts Observatory (RBO) in Wyoming.

TESS observed that the planet TOI-3757 b transits in front of its star, allowing astronomers to calculate that the planet’s diameter is about 150,000 kilometers (100,000 miles), or slightly larger than the diameter of Jupiter. The planet completes a full orbit around its host star in just 3.5 days, which is 25 times less than the 88 days it takes for the closest planet to our solar system, Mercury.

Astronomers then used NEID and HPF to measure the star’s apparent motion along its line of sight, also known as its radial velocity. These measurements provided the planet’s mass, which was calculated as about a quarter of Jupiter’s mass, or about 85 times the mass of Earth. Knowing its volume and mass, Kanodia’s team calculated the average density of TOI-3757b at 0.27 grams per cubic centimeter (about 17 grams per cubic foot), making it less than half the density.

« data-gt-translate-attributes = »[{« attribute= » »>Saturn[{« attribute= » »>saturn][{« attribute= » »>Saturn[{« attribute= » »>saturn (the least dense planet in the solar system), about a quarter as dense as water (meaning it would float if placed in a giant basin full of water), or actually just as dense as marshmallows.

« Potential future observations of the atmosphere of this planet using new NASA »

« data-gt-translate-attributes = »[{« attribute= » »>JamesWebbSpaceTelescope[{« attribute= » »>VesoljskiteleskopJamesWebb][{« attribute= » »>JamesWebbSpaceTelescope[{« attribute= » »>VesoljskiteleskopJamesWebb « It may help shed light on its inflammatory nature, » says Jessica Libby Roberts, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State University and the paper’s second author.

« Discovering more such systems with giant planets – which were thought to be very rare around red dwarfs – is part of our goal to understand how planets form, » Kanudia says.

This discovery highlights the importance of NEID in its ability to confirm some of the potential exoplanets currently being discovered by NASA’s TESS mission, providing important targets for the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study their atmospheres. This will inform astronomers about what planets are and how they formed, and for potentially habitable rocky worlds, whether they are capable of supporting life.

Reference: “TOI-3757B: Low Density Gas Orbiting a Solar Metal Dwarf” By Shubham Kanaudia, Jessica Libby Roberts, Caleb I Kainas, Joe P. Ninan, Suvrat Mahadevan, Gudmundur Stevenson, Andrea SJ Lyn Giant. , Sinclair Jones, Andrew Monson, Brooke A. Parker, Henry A. Kopolnicki, Terra N. Swaby, Luke Powers, Cory Bird, Chad F. Bender, Colin H. Blake, William D. Cochran, Jian Dong, Scott A. , Conor Frederick, Arvind F Gupta, Samuel Halverson, Fred Harty, Sarah E. Logsdon, Andrew J. Metcalfe, Michael W. McLaughlin, Carolyn Morley, Jaydef Rajagopal, Lawrence W. Ramsey, Paul Robertson, Arpita Roy, Christian Schwab, by Ryan C. Tyrion and John Wisniewski and Jason T. Braff, 5 Aug 2022, Available here. astronomical magazineAnd the
DOI: 10.3847 / 1538-3881 / ac7c20