A new discovery adds to the growing menagerie of exoplanets. These days, word of a new exoplanet discovery raises nary an eyebrow. To date, the current number of known exoplanets beyond our solar system stands at confirmed 6,148 worlds and counting.
An artist's impression of the TOI-2267 system. Credit: Mario Sucerquia.adds to the growing menagerie of exoplanets. These days, word of a new exoplanet discovery raises nary an eyebrow. To date, the current number of known exoplanets beyond our solar system stands at 6,148 worlds and counting.
out of the University of Liège in Belgium titled *Two Warm Earth-sized Planets and an Earth-sized Candidate in the Binary System TOI-2267* shows just how strange these worlds can be. looking at data gathered by the “The first hint that we were looking at something truly new came from our own planet-search software, which revealed two additional planets in the system that NASA’s TESS mission had not identified,” Sebastián Zúñiga-Fernández told *Universe Today*. “We spent many hours discussing whether these signals could really correspond to planets, since they implied a completely new kind of system architecture. When we finally confirmed their existence with the SPECULOOS network telescopes, it was an incredibly rewarding moment; we had proven that extremely compact binary systems can indeed host Earth-sized planets! The discovery is perfectly in line with the name of our research group in Liège, Belgium, led by Michaël Gillon: EXOTIC .”The location of TOI-2267 in the northern hemisphere sky. Credit: Stellarium/Dave Dickinson. The trio orbits a pair of M-type red dwarf stars, which are in turn 8 Astronomical Units apart, slightly closer than the distance between the Sun and Saturn. TOI-2267b has an orbital period of about 2.28 days, while TOI-2267c has a period of about 3.49 days, and their distances are approximately 0.0205 AU and 0.0263 AU respectively from their host star. The third planet, TOI-2267.02, is an exoplanet candidate with a period of about 2.03 days with a distance of approximately 0.0124 AU from its host star. 0.02 AU is equal to not quite 2 million miles; for context, the Moon is a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and Callisto is just over a million miles from Jupiter. We’re talking two solar systems in miniature, locked in a leisurely embrace. Standing on the surface of TOI-2267b, you’d see a bright red dwarf primary dominating the sky with a fainter but still prominent red dwarf companion nearby. The orbital distance for several exoplanets known to orbit red dwarf stars , versus stellar temperature and insolation. Credit: University of Liège. “It’s the first binary system where we see planets passing in front of—or transiting—both stars. We knew of binary systems with planets, but in the vast majority of cases, the planets would orbit just one of the stars,” says Zúñiga-Fernández. “In the very rare cases where planets were found around both, the stars were so far apart that they acted like two separate systems. TOI-2267 is a compact system where the two stars are relatively close together , and yet each has its own transiting planets. This is a brand-new architecture for a planetary system, making it a unique laboratory to study how planets form and evolve in the complex gravitational environment of a double star.” The three-body problem says that planetary systems around multiple star pairs should be unstable over the long term. It seems that we’re already seeing some exceptions to the rule, in the trio of worlds in the TOI-2267 system. TESS is an all-sky survey mission, looking for transiting exoplanets. Launched in 2018, TESS has far outlived its planned 2-year nominal mission. To date, TESS has discovered 7,655 candidate exoplanets. The future for exoplanet science may lie beyond programs like SHERLOCK, TRAPPIST, and“We have largely exhausted the follow-up observations possible with our TRAPPIST and SPECULOOS telescopes,” says Zúñiga-Fernández. “The next step requires the capabilities of larger facilities, such as the James Webb Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with over 6-meter diameters like the Gran Telescopio Canarias . The precision of these premier instruments is essential to perform more accurate transit timing measurements—looking for TTVs that can reveal the planets' masses—and to potentially study their atmospheres, should they exist.”Exoplanet science is a lesson in how common—or exceptional—the story of our solar system may be in the wider drama of the Universe. We’re now here, orbiting a solitary star, looking out at strange new worlds orbiting multiple stars that may be much more common than our own.David Dickinson is a freelance science writer and long-time sky watcher. He has built telescopes and observatories, chased eclipses, and travels and observes with his wife, Myscha, on a mission to get ‘eyes on the sky’ worldwide. His books The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Observing the Cosmos, The Astronomer’s Deep-Sky Field Guide and science fiction short stories are
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