An international astronomer team has discovered an exoplanet 90 light years away from Earth. It has a cooler atmosphere (57 Celsius) and is likely to have water clouds.Exoplanet ‘TOI-1231 b’ orbits the M-type dwarf star in 24 days.
*TOI-1231 b, about the size of Neptune. It was discovered using NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
*Once discovered by TESS, other observations are made using the Planet Finder spectrograph at the Magellan Clay Telescope at the Los Campanos Laboratory in Chile.
*Although uninhabitable on this planet, it is also one of the finest planets ever discovered by scientists.
How does TESS work?
TESS uses the transportation system to locate exoplanets. That is, when a planet passes in front of its star during orbit, it blocks a certain amount of light. This is called dip transit due to the visible light of the star.
*M dwarf stars are small in size, so the amount of light blocked by a planet orbiting them is large, making traffic more detectable.
*Tess is a space telescope that NASA conducted exoplanetary studies in 2018.