ESA Gaia Finds New Exoplanet With Ongoing Nuclear Fusion

European Space Agency's Gaia discovered a new exoplanet, showing that it can point the way to potential exoplanets.

ESA's Gaia Discovers HD 206893 c

A team of scientists has found a new exoplanet thanks to the Gaia spacecraft, and it appears to have an ongoing nuclear fusion in its core, Space.com reported.

The researchers said that nuclear fusion is apparent due to the brightening of the object. It uses deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen carrying a neutron.

Professor Sasha Hinkley at the University of Exeter in England discovered the exoplanet orbiting roughly 300 million miles away from star HD 206893, which is 130 light-years from Earth and is about 30% larger than the Sun.

The team used the GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to confirm the newfound planet knowns as HD 206893 c.

According to NASA, HD 206893 c is a gas giant exoplanet that orbits an F-type star. It is 13 times heavier than Jupiter, with an orbital radius of 3.53 AU and a planet radius of 1.46 x Jupiter. It completes one orbit of its star in 5.7 years. It was discovered in 2022.

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Significance of New Exoplanet's Discovery

The outlet noted that the ESA Gaia mission showed precise measurements of the locations of stars as they move across the sky. Its astrometric data also suggests that the presence of exoplanets can be inferred by measuring the wobble stars.

Hinkley added that the discovery of HD 206893 c is significant because it was the first direct detection of a "Gaia exoplanet." It signifies that the spacecraft can lead researchers to potential exoplanets, which can be directly detected by follow-up observations on the ground or by a space-based observatory using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

More About ESA's Gaia Mission

Gaia is an ambitious mission by the European Space Agency (ESA). It aims to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way to reveal our galaxy's composition, formation and evolution.

It provides accurate positional and radial velocity measurements to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in the galaxy and throughout the local group.

In April 2021, Gaia came across 12 quasars whose light was so strong that they were deflected by foreground galaxies and were visible as four distinct images, called "Einstein cross."

The crosses are a unique tool to understand dark matter and the universe's expansion rate. Einstein crosses are rare finds. Only 50 have been discovered since 1985.

Francois Mignard of the University of Côte d'Azur in France and a member of the Gaia Gravitational Lenses working group (GraL) said they don't have any clues on where to look for Estein crosses. Also, spatial resolution imaging is needed to locate candidates.

Gaia has been a game changer, enabling astronomers to survey the sky with unprecedented spatial resolution.