An article published in the journal “Science” reports the discovery of the exoplanet GJ 367 b, about the size of Mars, with a year lasting only eight hours. A team of researchers led by Kristine Lam and Szilárd Csizmadia of DLR, the German aerospace agency, used observations conducted by NASA’s TESS space telescope and follow-up detections conducted with the ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile’s HARPS instrument to obtain information on GJ 367 b. You could say that it’s a super-Mercury since the two planets have a similar iron core but on the side of GJ 367 b facing its star, a red dwarf, the estimated temperature is about 1,500° Celsius.

An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports a study on the formation of the planets of the ultra-cool star TRAPPIST-1’s system. A team of researchers exploited the particular configuration of the seven rocky planets to calculate how long their formation may have taken, obtaining a maximum value of a few million years, only a tenth of the time it took for the Earth to form. That’s because the resonance that exists between the planets can only have been maintained in the absence of a late bombardment of the kind that occurred in the solar system that completed its planets’ formation. One consequence is that water must have been absorbed by TRAPPIST-1’s planets during their formation in the protoplanetary disk.