The newly discovered planet is a part of the group of stars moving together that make up the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the Big Dipper.
In a system with two known planets, astronomers spotted something new: A small object transiting across the sun-sized star. This turned out to be another planet, which was extra hot and Earth-sized. To subscribe please click tau.id/2iy6f and access our live channel.
The newly spotted planet, called HD 63433 d, is tidally locked, meaning there is a dayside that always faces its star and a side that is constantly in darkness.
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This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, orbits around the star HD 63433 (TOI 1726) in the HD 63433 planetary system.
That side can reach a brutal 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit and may flow with lava, while the opposite side is forever dark. The star is about 73 light years away from our sun.
This scorching world is the smallest confirmed exoplanet younger than 500 million years old. It’s also the closest discovered Earth-sized planet this young, at about 400 million years old.
A team of astronomers analyzed this system using data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), where planets cross in front of their star as they orbit, blocking a tiny piece of the starlight.
Two planets had already been previously discovered in this planetary system, so to see what else might be lurking in the star’s orbit, the team took the data and removed the signals of the two known planets.
This allowed them to see an additional signal—a small transit that would reappear every 4.2 days. Upon further investigation, they were able to validate that this was actually a third, smaller planet.
The planet is very close to Earth size (it is approximately 1.1 times the diameter of our own planet) and it’s orbiting a star that’s similar to the size of our sun (about 0.91 the size and 0.99 the mass of the sun).
