September 6, 2023

Artist's concept of the TOI-4600 system (Image courtesy Tedi Vick)

An article published in the “Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the discovery of two exoplanets orbiting the star TOI-4600 of which the outermost is the one with the longest year discovered so far. A team of researchers used observations conducted with NASA’s TESS space telescope to find traces of these two gas exoplanets. Other ground-based observatories were used to confirm the existence of these two exoplanets and obtain more information about them. TOI-4600 b has a year of nearly 83 Earth days, a bit shorter than Mercury’s, while TOI-4600 c has a year of nearly 483 days, the longest of all known exoplanets. This is a useful discovery to understand what other planetary systems are like because exoplanets close to their stars are much easier to discover while we still know very little about the ones far from their stars.