14 DAY TRIAL // A team of astronomers announced today that a new extrasolar planet has been discovered in the known star system called Kepler-10. The object has been dubbed Kepler-10c, which means that it's the second exoplanet in the system, classified by the distance it orbits its parent star from.
The object was discovered by the NASA Kepler Telescope, which was designed specifically to conduct studies of distant stars, and find exoplanets. Thus far, the planet-hunting observatory identified 1,235 objects of interest, including this one.
The finding was confirmed using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, which operates in infrared wavelengths. The instrument is one of the four Great Observatories the American space agency built.
Officials managing Spitzer confirmed the Kepler discovery on Monday, May 23. The star system itself was confirmed to lie in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, some 560 light-years away.
“The Kepler telescope has discovered two planets around this star. Kepler-10b is, to date, the smallest known rocky exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system,” a Spitzer science team press release reads.
“This planet, which has a radius of 1.4 times that of Earth's, whips around its star every 0.8 days. Its discovery was announced in January 2011,” the statement indicates.
Kepler's main objective is to identify second Earths, exoplanets that reside within their parent star's habitable zones, where temperatures are just right to support the existence of liquid water.
The telescope also needs to find planetary objects that are similar to our home in mass and size, and which features a similar chemical composition. Thus far, this research has been relatively unsuccessful.
“Now, in May 2011, the Kepler team is announcing another member of the Kepler-10 family, called Kepler-10c. It's bigger than Kepler-10b with a radius of 2.2 times that of Earth's, and it orbits the star every 45 days,” the press release indicates.
According to experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who manage the Spitzer Telescope, both exoplanets are tremendously hot, as they are located very close to their parent star. Kepler-10b is definitely tidally locked to the stellar object, the team adds.
“In the case of Kepler-10c, scientists can be 99.998 percent sure that the signal they detected is from an orbiting planet. Part of this confidence comes from the fact that Spitzer, an infrared observatory, saw a signal similar to what Kepler detected in visible light,” the Spitzer team reveals.
“If the signal were coming from something other than an orbiting planet – for example an indistinguishable background pair of orbiting stars – then scientists would expect to see different signals in visible and infrared light,” their statement concludes.