85 new potential planets outside the Solar System have been identified: similar in size to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, they could have temperatures suitable for hosting life.
The result, obtained thanks to observations from NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by an international collaboration led by Faith Hawthorn of the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom.
The new exoplanet candidates were identified thanks to the transit technique, that is, analyzing the variations in brightness of 1.4 million stars due to the passage of planets in front of their stellar disc.
Typically, discovering an exoplanet in this way requires observing at least three transits, in order to determine how long it takes to orbit the star.
However, in this new study the researchers focused on systems that had only two transits, in order to identify exoplanets with longer orbital periods, therefore further from the parent star and potentially colder.
As a result, 85 possible exoplanets were identified (of which 60 were completely unknown) that take 20 to 700 days to orbit their parent star, while the majority of exoplanets usually observed by TESS have orbital periods of 3-10 days. .
In some cases, exoplanets are found in the so-called 'habitable zone', which is a region far enough from the parent star to allow a temperature suitable for supporting life.
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