A team of researchers has discovered a super-Earth orbiting GJ 740, a cold dwarf star located around 36 light-years from our planet.
In recent years, scientists have been conducting an exhaustive search for red dwarf stars, with the aim of finding exoplanets orbiting around them. These stars have an effective temperature between 2,400 and 3,700 K – 2,000 degrees cooler than the Sun – and a mass between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses.
Now, a team of researchers, led by Borja Toledo Padrón, PhD student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and specialising in the search for planets around this type of star, has discovered a super-Earth around GJ 740, a cold dwarf star located around 36 light-years from our planet.
This planet revolves around its star with an orbital period of 2.4 days and has a mass of approximately three Earth masses.
“We are facing the planet with the second shortest orbital period around this type of star. The mass and orbital period of this planet suggest a rocky composition, as well as an estimated radius of 1.4 terrestrial radii, which can be confirmed with future observations from the TESS satellite,” Toledo Padrón explained in a statement.
The data also indicate the presence of a possible second planet with an orbital period of nine years and a mass similar to Saturn’s – approximately 100 Earth masses – although its radial velocity signal could be caused by the star’s magnetic cycle.
The Kepler mission, recognised as one of the most successful in detecting exoplanets by the transit method, which consists of looking for small periodic variations in the brightness of the star caused by transits of planets orbiting around it, discovered a total of 156 new planets around cool stars.
From these data, it was estimated that these types of stars host an average of 2.5 planets with an orbital period of less than 200 days.
