An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of an object that could be a gas giant planet or a brown dwarf in the HIP 81208 system. A team of researchers analyzed data from the archive of the observations conducted with the SPHERE instrument mounted on the VLT in Chile discovering an object that was cataloged as HIP 81208 Cb orbiting the smaller of the two stars in this binary system. A brown dwarf was discovered around the more massive star together with the smaller and more distant star in an analysis also published some time ago in an article in “Astronomy & Astrophysics”. The new discovery makes HIP 81208 a so-called hierarchical quadruple system, the first of its kind discovered using a direct imaging system.

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.