July 28, 2019

Artistic representation of a gaseous planet in a binary system (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the discovery of a gaseous exoplanet in the DS Tuc binary system thanks to the use of NASA’s TESS space telescope. A team of astronomers coordinated by Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, conducted this research on the exoplanet named DS Tuc Ab, which has an estimated age of about 45 million years, a sort of preteen. It has completed its growth but it’s still in a phase in which changes take place, all useful information to understand the formation and evolution of the planets.