Four Of Our Planets Are Missing. NASA Announces 5,000th New Alien World But Some Are Imposters Say Scientists - Forbes

Space agency NASA has announced that the number of known exoplanets—planets that orbit a star other than our Sun—has passed the 5,000 mark.

The latest batch, a haul of 65 “new” exoplanets that includes a red dwarf star with five orbiting planets, has been added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

However, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has discovered that three—and possibly four—of the exoplanets included in the archive are, in fact, just stars.

Astronomers reckon there to be hundreds of billions of exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy, but it’s taken 30 years to get to 5,000 confirmed discoveries after the first detection in 1992.

“It’s not just a number,” said Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena. “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet.”

NASA’s Exoplanet Archive only includes exoplanets confirmed in peer-reviewed scientific papers, though astronomers have detected another 5,000 planetary candidates—objects that might be planets but have yet to be confirmed.

However, there are doubts even about some confirmed exoplanets. A new paper published in the Astronomical Journal contains evidence against the very existence of four exoplanets.

Originally discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope—a missions from 2009 through 2018 that’s responsible for the lion’s share of exoplanet detections—it’s claimed that four exoplanets have been misclassified.

The authors estimate Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b and Kepler-699b to be between two and four times the size of Jupiter. They used new data on the measurements of planets from the new Gaia mission, which has been precisely measuring and mapping the properties and movements of stars in the Milky Way.

In short, they’re stars, not planets.

“Most exoplanets are Jupiter-sized or much smaller,” said Prajwal Niraula, first author of the study and a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “Twice [the size of] Jupiter is already suspicious. Larger than that cannot be a planet, which is what we found.”

The more than 5,000 exoplanets confirmed in our galaxy so far include a variety of types – some that ... [+] are similar to planets in our solar system, others vastly different. Among these are a mysterious variety known as “super-Earths” because they are larger than our world and possibly rocky.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

A fourth planet, Kepler-747b, is now thought to be about 1.8 times Jupiter’s size, which is as large as any planet found so far. However, it orbits its host star from too far away to receive significant light.

However, it was Kepler-854b that set alarm bells ringing when it turned out to be a whopping three times the size of Jupiter. “There’s no way the Universe can make a planet of that size,” said Avi Shporer, an author of the study and a research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “It just doesn’t exist.”

Could there be more rogue stars masquerading as planets in NASA’s Exoplanet Archive? probably not. “This is a tiny correction [that] comes from the better understanding of stars, which is only improving all the time,” said Shporer. “These misclassifications are not going to happen many times more.”

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/03/21/four-of-our-planets-are-missing-nasa-announces-5000th-new-alien-world-but-some-are-imposters-say-scientists/

2022-03-22 03:00:00Z
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