IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration
Astronomers Find The Lightest Exoplanet Ever Caught On Camera
• popsci.comBased on the exoplanet's brightness, astronomers predict it has a mass just four to five times that of Jupiter. The planet's host star, which is slightly bigger than our sun and surrounded by a disc of debris, is fairly youthful—only 10 million to 17 million years old (the sun is about 4.6 billion years old).
"The brightness of the star gives HD 95086 b an estimated surface temperature of about 700 degrees Celsius," says Gaël Chauvin, a researcher at the Institut de Planetologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble in France. "This is cool enough for water vapor and possibly methane to exist in its atmosphere."