A giant ball plunges everything around into darkness
And, we must give them their due, quite successfully - thanks to them important discoveries have been made more than once. For example, a significant contribution was made by members of the Planet Hunters astronomical project team in collaboration with scientists from Yale: they made the first discovery of an exoplanet located in a four-star system.
In such a starry world, there are as many as four suns - one has only to imagine how interesting it is to exist in it! The system contains two pairs of stars, one pair is periodically eclipsing each other dwarfs. Such "blackouts" affect the brightness of these stars, which is what astronomers observe.
It is worth noting that it is not so easy to find exoplanets, because they are located outside the solar system, at great distances from us, and, moreover, they are quite small in comparison with the stars. The first exoplanets were discovered only in 1980, when the famous Kepler telescope satellite was used to study outer space. Then, more than two thousand exoplanets were immediately discovered, however, only 843 of them received official proof (detection by ground-based telescopes).
The information on the new four-star system, obtained from Kepler, was also processed by amateur astronomers - Kian Yek and Robert Galliano. They drew attention to these changes in the luminosity of the stars, and logically assumed that in this case, a planet must be present in the system. They reported their guess to professional astronomers at the Keck Observatory, who use the spectral method to analyze periodicity. This time, the existence of the exoplanet was confirmed, it was named PH1.
It was found that it is three times larger in size than the Earth, and the weight of the find is about half the mass of Jupiter, which takes the place of the leader in size among the planets of the solar system.
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Of course, a lot of exoplanets with characteristics similar to Earth have already been discovered. For example, an exoplanet codenamed KOI-314c is similar in mass to "our home" and is "only" two hundred light years away. But the "discovery" in diameter is very different from the Earth - by as much as 60%, which indicates the presence of a dense gaseous atmosphere in the exoplanet. This planet was discovered by David Kipling, a scientist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center. He drew particular attention to the fact that the new exoplanet has qualitative differences from the Earth, in particular in terms of physical characteristics. Since the center of the orbit of KOI-314c is a cooling red dwarf, the average temperature on the planet's surface is about 93 degrees. The density of this exoplanet is 30% greater than that of water, which makes it possible to put forward a hypothesis about helium and hydrogen,as the main components of its atmosphere. According to preliminary observations of scientists, the planet has many similarities with Neptune.
Recently, in the vicinity of the Sun, a group of astronomers discovered a star in the constellation Draco, it was given the name Tress-2B, but the most interesting property with which it attracted the attention of scientists is its globally black color and almost absolute inability to reflect light. In addition, the temperature of this celestial body is approximately 1000 degrees Celsius, which already says a lot. It is possible that there is a large concentration of gas on the surface of the star, so it only absorbs light. Its ability to reflect light is maximum 1%, so the planets look like a giant black ball. It is also possible that the small distance separating it from the mother planet also plays a role. Another name for Tress-2B is "hot Jupiter", and it revolves around a star that has the same spectral class as our Sun.
At the end of February this year, NASA held an emergency meeting in connection with the discovery of seven planets in the orbit of the Trappist-1 star, which have about the same temperature as our Sun. Scientists suggest that from one of the discovered planets you can "look" at the neighboring ones as well as from the Earth to the Moon. Three of them are potentially liveable. And the distance from Earth to them is equal to 39 light years, which is not so far by the standards of cosmic distances. The discovered planets are drawn to each other and have a gravitational influence on each other. They revolve around Trappist-1 much faster than the Earth revolves around the Sun. Scientists have yet to find out whether there is water on these planets, establish in more detail their characteristics and the presence of satellites. While there is no way to launch spacecraft to these planets,therefore, astronomers now study them only with telescopes.
Scientists also suggest that in the near future we will discover new planets and stars of this type. NASA is now observing several dozen planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun. The existence of more than 3500 thousand of these celestial bodies has been confirmed, and scientists have also calculated the number of exoplanets that "inhabit" the Milky Way galaxy - about 100 billion. There are many stars similar to the Sun, but only a third of their total number has planets in their own orbit, which, by some characteristics, can be compared with the Earth.