A team of researchers from the Space Research Institute in Barcelona (Spain) discovered a super-earth in the constellation Draco, orbiting a red dwarf 55 light-years from Earth.
The exoplanet was discovered using the high-precision spectrograph HARPS-N installed on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
“We analyzed 145 spectroscopic observations of Gliese 3942 over the past five years and additional photometry to dislodge the effects of stellar activity from actual Doppler signals,” says Manuel Perger, lead author of the study.
The newly discovered world of Gliese 3942b is about 7 times more massive than Earth. It orbits the red dwarf Gliese 3942 (40% smaller than the Sun) at a distance of 0.06 astronomical units. One year on the planet lasts 6.9 Earth days, and the surface temperature reaches 300 degrees Celsius.
But that's not all. According to the team, there is a periodic signal in the data that hints at a second planet in the system, but at this moment they cannot speak of its existence with certainty.
According to preliminary calculations, the candidate Gliese 3942c is 6.3 times more massive than Earth, has an equilibrium temperature of 242 degrees Celsius, and makes one revolution around the star in about 10 days.
Roman Zakharov