An international team of astrophysicists, including the Portuguese Alexandre Correia and João Faria, has detected a second extrasolar planet orbiting two stars, after the first was discovered in 2020, it was announced Monday.
The discovery of BEBOP-1c, the second exoplanet (planet outside the Solar System) to orbit the stellar duo BEBOP-1, involved astrophysicists from the University of Coimbra and the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and was published in the specialized journal Nature Astronomy.
It is a new planetary system similar to the fictional planet Tatooine, from the “Star Wars” saga. In the film, Tatooine is a world orbiting two twin stars in the Outer Rim galaxy.
According to João Faria, an IA researcher quoted in a joint statement by the UC and the IA, the detection of BEBOP-1c will make it possible to “study the conditions in which these planets are formed, which are different from those that existed during the formation of the Solar system”.
The exoplanet has a mass about four times that of Neptune (one of the gas giants and last planet in the Solar System) and orbits the two stars in 215 days (seven months), after being discovered by the international team from observations. with telescopes from the European Southern Observatory, installed in Chile, and data from two spectrographs (instruments that record the spectrum of light).
The first planet, BEBOP-1b, detected in 2020 thanks to the American space telescope TESS, is almost the diameter of Saturn and orbits the same two stars in 95 days (three months).
In a statement, the British University of Birmingham, which led the work, notes that 12 circumbinary systems (containing planets that orbit two stars in the center instead of one, as in the Solar System) are known to date.
However, the BEBOP-1 system is the second to host more than one planet.
Source: TSF
