10 AMAZING EXOPLANETS

A PLANET WITH TWO SUNS

TIC 172900988 b

DISCOVERED: 2021

DETECTION METHOD:

TRANSIT

NASA’s top planet hunter at the moment is TESS – the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. This detects exoplanets by measuring the slight dimming of their host stars when a planet crosses the telescope’s line of sight to them. This can be a slow process, though, because astronomers may need to observe several transits to get a full picture of the planet’s orbit – and there may be months or years between transits, depending on how rapidly the planet orbits. But in the case of TIC 172900988 b, the whole process was very quick. That’s because it orbits two stars, and TESS saw it transit across both of them. It also observed no fewer than three mutual eclipses between the stars themselves. Putting all this information together gave researchers everything they needed to calculate the orbit in detail.

BROWN DWARF PLANET

CFHTWIR-Oph 98 b

DISCOVERED: 2020

DETECTION METHOD:

DIRECT IMAGING

Brown dwarfs are enigmatic objects that are neither stars nor planets. Being 15 to 75 times the mass of Jupiter, they’re unable to sustain the fusion reactions that make stars shine, yet they’re found in the depths of space rather than orbiting around a star like planets do. Brown dwarfs are sometimes found in pairs which orbit a common