Prepared by: Mustafa Al-Zoubi
An international team of astronomers led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, has discovered a new gas giant planet outside the solar system using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
The newly discovered planet, TOI-3235 b, is 400 million years old. It is the size of Jupiter and orbits its host star in less than three days.
TESS is currently surveying about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun, with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. To date, more than 6,100 exoplanet candidates have been identified and about 3,000 of them have been confirmed so far.
The researchers wrote: “The new planet, which is the size of Jupiter, has a short period, orbiting a dwarf star. The radius of the planet is 1.02 the radius of Jupiter, and its mass was measured to be 0.66 of the mass of Jupiter.”
The planet orbits its host every 2.59 days, and the equilibrium temperature is estimated at 604 K.