Strange planetary system has 3 'Venus'

NASA's state-of-the-art planetary hunter TESS has discovered a strange planetary system, including the smallest known planet in TESS's search history.

TESS, a warrior in charge of NASA's search for extraterrestrial planets, has identified three more planets orbiting a M-type dwarf named L 98-59, located The way we are only 35 light years.

Picture comparing 3 newly discovered planets with Mars (Mars) and Earth (Earth) - (photo: NASA)

Revealed in a paper published on the Astronomical Journal, the TESS operational team, represented by Dr. Veselin Kostov, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the SETI Institute, regret that no planet in this planetary system belonging to the "life zone" of the mother star L 98-59 , where water qualifies as liquid.

However, an equally valuable feature is that they occupy the so-called "Venus region" of their star mother. That's where the planets may have once possessed the atmosphere like the earth, but in the evolution of the planetary system, they have to experience the super-greenhouse effect, which stripped its atmosphere roughly and turn it into a replica of Venus - the solar system's hottest planet.

Of the three planets, planet L 98-59b is closest to the star mother, about the size of Mars and Earth, a year lasts only 2.25 days and receives energy from its "sun" . 22 times the earth. This is the smallest planet in TESS's search history.

Description of newly discovered planetary system - (photo: NASA).

The other two planets, L 98-59c and L 98-59d , have 1.4 and 1.6 times the earth respectively, 1 year in length, 3.7 and 7.5 Earth days respectively. .

The giant 98-59d L may be a Venus-like rock world or a world of small rock cores and a dense atmosphere like Neptune.

This finding is unique in that planets so close to their stars as these three planets are extremely difficult to identify. From a distance, the light from the stars often obscures the nearby planets, causing most of the planets to be recorded before to be the most distant astronomical objects.