{"id":38939,"date":"2012-07-18T11:16:30","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T15:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=38939"},"modified":"2024-02-09T11:54:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T16:54:05","slug":"ucf-discovers-exoplanet-neighbor-universitys-first-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/ucf-discovers-exoplanet-neighbor-universitys-first-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"UCF Discovers Its First Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"
The 女仆AV has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33-light years away.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very close-by planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope,” Kevin Stevenson \u201912PhD says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The exoplanet candidate, called UCF 1.01, is close to its star, so close it goes around the star in 1.4 days. The planet\u2019s surface likely reaches temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The discoverers believe that it has no atmosphere, is only two-thirds the gravity of Earth and that its surface may be volcanic or molten.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very close-by planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope,” said Kevin Stevenson \u201912PhD, a lead author of the paper, which appears online tomorrow in The Astrophysical Journal<\/em>. \u201cThis discovery is a significant accomplishment for UCF.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stevenson and his colleagues were studying a hot-Neptune exoplanet, designated GJ 436b, already known to exist around the red-dwarf star GJ 436, when data revealed clues that led them to suspect there could be at least one new planet in that system, perhaps two.<\/p>\n
The team noticed slight dips in the amount of infrared light streaming from the star. A review of Spitzer archival data showed that the dips were periodic, suggesting that a planet might be blocking out a small fraction of light as it passed in front of GJ 436, as seen from Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could see these faint dips in the starlight and I wanted to determine their source. I knew that if these signals were periodic, they could be from an unknown planet,\u201d said Stevenson, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n