Astronomers estimate that most stars in the Universe are accompanied by planets revolving around them (aka exoplanets). About a century ago, scientists were only hypothesizing that exoplanets exist, but meanwhile, several thousands of them had been discovered.
SciTechDaily announces that after analyzing data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) of NASA, astronomers have identified four exoplanets orbiting the young stars known as TOI 2076 and TOI 1807.
The “teenage” exoplanets are amazing
Christina Hedges, who’s an astronomer at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field and at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, declared as quoted by SciTechDaily.com:
The planets in both systems are in a transitional, or teenage, phase of their life cycle,
They’re not newborns, but they’re also not settled down. Learning more about planets in this teen stage will ultimately help us understand older planets in other systems.
SciTechDaily’s YouTube channel even posted a video about the new findings:
The two stars are located more than 130 light-years away from us, meaning that we’ll never be able to go there with our current technology. Also, there are 30 light-years separating TOI 2076 from TOI 1807. Both stars are K-type dwarfs, and they’re “only” about 200 million years old. Although their age sounds like an eternity for us, it represents less than 5% of our Sun’s age.
Although the stars are too departed to be orbiting each other, their shared motion suggests that they’re somehow related and born from the same cloud of gas.
George Zhou, a co-author of the study and an astrophysicist from the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, revealed another amazing aspect about TOI 2076 from TOI 1807, while also quoted by SciTechDaily:
The stars produce perhaps 10 times more UV light than they will when they reach the Sun’s age.
The paper describing the new findings was published in The Astronomical Journal.