NOIRLab | 2020 Aug 04
Small telescope and inexpensive diffuser key to results
New detailed observations with NSF’s NOIRLab facilities reveal a young exoplanet, orbiting a young star in the Hyades cluster, that is unusually dense for its size and age. Weighing in at 25 Earth-masses, and slightly smaller than Neptune, this exoplanet’s existence is at odds with the predictions of leading planet formation theories.
New observations of the exoplanet, known as K2-25b ... raise new questions about current theories of planet formation. The exoplanet has been found to be unusually dense for its size and age — raising the question of how it came to exist. ...
Slightly smaller than Neptune, K2-25b orbits an M-dwarf star — the most common type of star in the galaxy — in 3.5 days. The planetary system is a member of the Hyades star cluster, a nearby cluster of young stars in the direction of the constellation Taurus. The system is approximately 600 million years old, and is located about 150 light-years from Earth.
Planets with sizes between those of Earth and Neptune are common companions to stars in the Milky Way, despite the fact that no such planets are found in our Solar System. Understanding how these “sub-Neptune” planets form and evolve is a frontier question in studies of exoplanets. ...
The Habitable-Zone Planet Finder Reveals a High Mass and a
Low Obliquity for the Young Neptune K2-25b ~ Gudmundur Stefansson et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2007.12766 > 24 Jul 2020
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