TOI-1422 is a sun-like star located 500 light-years away from us. A planet had already been found there before. Now scientists know that there are at least two planets there, and it is possible that there is a third one.
New planet
Astronomers from the Turin Observatory in Italy report the discovery of a second planet in the TOI-1422 system, located approximately 500 light-years from Earth. The newly discovered exoplanet, designated TOI-1422 c, is almost three times larger and approximately 14 times more massive than Earth. The discovery was presented in a research paper published on November 14 on the arXiv preprint server.
TOI-1422, also known as TIC 333473672, is a G2V spectral type star located approximately 505 light-years away from us. Its age is estimated to be 4.6 billion years. The star is similar in size and mass to the Sun, and its effective temperature is about 5811 K.
Previous observations of TOI-1422 showed that there is a warm exoplanet the size of Neptune (TOI-1422b) in its orbit. One revolution takes 13 days. At that time, the existence of a second planet with an orbital period of about 29 days was also suggested.
There is a planet after all
A new study conducted by a team of astronomers led by Luca Naponiello of the Turin Observatory in Italy has confirmed preliminary assumptions. Their conclusions are based on data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which searches for planets and measures radial velocities.
According to the study, the exoplanet TOI-1422 c orbits its star every 34.5 days, at a distance of approximately 0.2 AU from it. Therefore, its orbital period is several days longer than previously thought.
The collected data indicates that TOI-1422 c has a radius of approximately 2.61 times that of Earth and is 14 times more massive than Earth, giving it a density of 4.3 g/cm3. The planet’s equilibrium temperature is estimated at 628K.
Therefore, based on the results, the authors of the study classified TOI-1422 c as a sub-Neptune exoplanet. It turned out that the recently confirmed alien world, despite being about 20% smaller than TOI-1422, is almost 50% more massive than the inner planet.
The authors of the article add that they analyzed the transit times of TOI-1422 b and found significant transit time variations (TTV). They note that such variations are not caused by gravitational perturbations from TOI-1422c, but may be caused by an invisible planetary companion. However, additional photometric observations and very accurate radial velocity measurements are needed to confirm this hypothesis.
According to phys.org
