While planet hunters continue their search for habitable zones around the cosmos, a new finding is causing a stir among scientists. Two exoplanets orbiting a Sun-like star have been discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters TESS project.
UNSPECIFIED: In this NASA digital illustration handout released on February 22, 2017, an artist's concept allows us to imagine what it would be like to stand on the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system in the constellation Aquarius.
Citizen Scientists
Over a dozen citizen scientists took part in the NASA-led effort, according to the latest discovery published in Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Citizen science is a collaborative effort between scientists and members of the public. Across 29,000 people worldwide have signed up to assist scientists to find exoplanets through the Planet Hunters TESS project.
In the paper Planet Hunters TESS III: two transiting planets around the brilliant G dwarf HD 152843, Planet Hunters TESS has announced the discovery of the two exoplanets.
Cesar Rubio and his son Miguel are among the thousands of volunteers who participated in the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science initiative, looking for evidence of exoplanets in TESS data. Rubio and more than a dozen other citizen scientists are co-authors on two new exoplanets discovered by the project.
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Planet B, C
Phys.org said HD 152843 is roughly 352 light-years away from Earth and has a mass similar to that of the Sun, but is 1.5 times larger and brighter. Two alien worlds orbit this huge star, and when compared to our Sun, they are inside Mercury's orbit.
Planet b is 3.4 times the size of Earth but about the same size as Neptune, and it orbits the star every 12 days. Planet c, on the other hand, is 5.8 times larger than Earth and orbits HD 152843 in around 19-35 days.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) monitored the star's brightness for a month to make the finding. The star's brightness changed throughout the observation, with a decrease in intensity whenever planets entered the satellite's frame of vision. This suggested that the star may have at least one planet around it. However, at least two transits were detected by all 15 scientists involved in the experiment, indicating that two planets were orbiting the star.
TESS Initiative In Making Planet Hunters' Project
Meanwhile, scientists employed the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern Hemisphere (HARPS-N) telescope in Spain and the Extreme Precision Spectrometer at Lowell Observatory to validate the presence two planets and the accuracy of the data.
"We're taking baby steps towards the direction of finding an Earth-like planet and studying its atmosphere and continue to push the boundaries of what we can see," lead author of the paper, Nora Eisner, a doctoral student in astrophysics at the University of Oxford said in a statement released by NASA. She went on to say that combining the two is a good way to constrain hypotheses about how planets arise and evolve through time.
Scientists are continuing their observations to confirm the mass of these two planets. They are hopeful that once the James Webb Telescope, which is expected to launch later this year, is operational, they will be able to peer deep into the system's atmosphere and see what kinds of molecules make up the atmosphere.
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