Planets

The Valles Marineris (Image ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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An article published in the journal “Icarus” reports the identification of traces of water in the subsoil of the Valles Marineris, the largest system of canyons on the planet Mars. A team of researchers used data collected by FREND instrument of TGO space probe, part of ESA and Roscosmos’ ExoMars program, to map hydrogen, generally bound to oxygen into water molecules, in the soil’s upper layer. The area marked by the presence of water has a size close to those of the Netherlands, and part of it is located in the valleys of Candor Chasma, in the northern part of the Valles Marineris. That marks the discovery of water in the equatorial regions of Mars, where it was believed that temperatures were not low enough to prevent the sublimation of water so close to the surface.

BD+60 1417's system

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of an object orbiting BD+60 1417, a young star a little smaller than the Sun, which could be a gas giant planet but also a small brown dwarf. Amateur astronomer Jörg Schümann spotted a moving object by examining images in the “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” program that anyone can participate in. A team led by Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History used various telescopes to confirm the existence of the object, cataloged as CWISER J124332.12+600126.2 or simply W1243. Its mass was estimated between 10 and 20 times the planet Jupiter’s, around the border between planet and brown dwarf, estimated around 13 Jupiter masses. The object had escaped previous research probably because its distance from its star is about 1660 times that of the Earth from the Sun.

b Centauri's system seen by SPHERE

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the discovery of a planet in the binary system b Centauri, the most massive in which a planet has been discovered. A team of researchers used ESO’s VLT in Chile to locate the exoplanet cataloged as b Centauri (AB)b or simply b Centauri b photographing it with the SPHERE instrument. It’s a record-breaking planet also because it has a mass estimated at about ten times Jupiter’s, making it one of the most massive known planets, with an orbit that is about one hundred times farther from the two stars than Jupiter’s distance from the Sun. The researchers think that b Centauri b likely formed in another area of its system and then moved due to gravitational interactions.

Artist impression of exoplanet GJ 367 b (Image courtesy SPP 1992 (Patricia Klein))

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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.

Scheme of TRAPPIST-1 planets' orbits (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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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.