9 new planets join the “Hot Jupiter” category
An international team of astronomers, using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) operated by the United States space agency NASA, has identified 9 new exoplanets classified as “Hot Jupiters,” with one of them being approximately four times the size of the planet Jupiter.
TESS, in its mission to survey nearly 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun, has so far discovered more than 7,000 candidate exoplanets, including those recently discovered.
The nine newly discovered planets are similar in size to Jupiter, but their masses range from 0.55 to 3.88 times the mass of Jupiter. Their orbital periods are less than 8 days, and their equilibrium temperatures range from 1000 to 1772 Kelvin.
It is worth noting that two of them, namely TOI-3919 b and TOI-5301 b, show significant orbital deviations, indicating the possibility of extreme tidal migration.
The host stars’ radii range from 0.84 to 2.19 solar radii, and their masses range from 0.9 to 1.57 solar masses.
This discovery, detailed in a preprint research publication (arXiv), enhances the understanding of the formation and evolution of Hot Jupiter exoplanets.
The stars hosting these external planets are located at a distance of 576-1985 light-years, and the estimated age of the oldest two stars is around 8 billion years.
