Youngest and Warm Jupiter-Like Planet Discovered

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SPACE — An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new, young, warm exoplanet. It orbits a distant star called TOI-4862 which is also relatively young.

The newly discovered alien world, named TOI-4862 b or NGTS-30 b, is similar in size and mass to our Jupiter in the Solar System. The findings were published on the pre-print server arXiv on April 3, 2024.

Initially, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has identified more than 7,100 candidate exoplanets or TESS Objects of Interest (TOI), and 432 of them have been confirmed so far. Since its launch in April 2018, the satellite has surveyed 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Matthew Battley from the University of Geneva in Switzerland has confirmed another TOI monitored by TESS. They identified a transit signal in the light curve of TOI-4862, a young G-type star located about 762 light years from us. The signal was planetary in nature so it was confirmed through follow-up observations.

“NGTS-30 b or TOI-4862 b was first discovered via a single transit in TESS photometry, before archival photometry from NGTS (Next Generation Transit Survey) and EulerCam was used to refine the planet’s (transit) period,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

The NGTS monitoring plot shows the nightly average flux for the star TOI-4862. Image: Battley et al., 2024

TOI-4862 b has a radius of 0.93 Jupiter radii and a mass of approximately 0.96 Jupiter masses. The planet orbits its host star every 98.3 days in a fairly eccentric orbit at a distance of 0.41 AU from it. 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun of about 150 million kilometers.

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Because of this eccentricity, the temperature of TOI-4862 b likely varies from 274 to 500 Kelvin. Its host star, TOI-4862 is several percent smaller and less massive than the sun and is estimated to be only 1.1 billion years old.

Compare the age of the sun which is 4.6 billion years. The star has an effective temperature of around 5,455 Kelvin and its metallic properties are at -0.03 dex.

The parameters obtained make the planet TOI-4862 b one of the youngest warm Jupiters ever discovered. Based on interior modeling, astronomers found TOI-4862 b to have a heavy element mass fraction of 0.23 and a heavy element enrichment of 20, which makes it more metal-rich than its parent.

The researchers highlight a number of unique features of TOI-4862 b, and propose further investigation into this intriguing exoworld. “The star’s age of 1.1 billion years makes NGTS-30 b/TOI-4862 b one of the youngest warm Jupiters discovered, adding an important new system to understanding the time scale of the evolution of these planets,” the authors said.

Future research is expected to refer to the spin-orbit angle and atmosphere of the planet TOI-4862 b. This will help further determine the migration history and composition of this interesting system. Source: phys.org