Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

First the report, then a brief Talkshop analysis.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star, reports MessageToEagle.com.

The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

Two other worlds orbit the same star.

While all three planets’ sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present.

The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets — that is, planets beyond our solar system — that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.

“The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS,” Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a press release.

Full report here.
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Talkshop analysis

For the planets b,c and d the orbit numbers we can use here are:
519 b = 1169.4108 days
317 c = 1169.8568 d
157 d = 1169.8541 d
(orbit data from exoplanets.eu)

If the number for planet b was 2 less we would have these synodic ratios:
160 c-d: 200 b-c: 360 b-d = 4:5:9 (or 2²:5:3²).

So we suggest this is the fundamental resonance of this planetary system, although two ‘extra’ orbits of the small body are present in the full cycle (which adds 2 to b-c and b-d).

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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July 15, 2019 at 08:50AM