Exoplanet Catalog
TIC 172900988 b
An exoplanet planet about as big around as Jupiter belongs to a system that’s a stunner. The planet orbits two stars and, viewed from Earth, crosses the faces of both. That means this system put on quite a show for astronomers: They observed the two stars make a total of three eclipses, while the planet traced its way across one star and then, a few days later, across the other.
Worlds that orbit two stars are known as “circumbinary” planets because they orbit “binary” stars, or stars in orbit around each other. Finding transiting circumbinaries is quite rare; TESS’s predecessor, the now retired Kepler Space Telescope, yielded discoveries of thousands of exoplanets, but only around a dozen circumbinary planets. The exoplanet TIC 172900988 b is a gas giant the size of our own Jupiter, though far more massive. It orbits two Sun-like stars that, in turn, orbit each other.
High-resolution imaging in the near-infrared part of the light spectrum revealed what might be a third star in this system. The star would have a very long orbit – about 5,000 years – encircling both stars and the newly discovered planet. This ultra-cool star has a low mass (or heft), less than 10 percent of the other two stars and only 30 times more massive than the giant planet.
PLANET TYPE
Gas Giant
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DISCOVERY DATE
2021
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MASS
2.96386 Jupiters
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PLANET RADIUS
1.004 x Jupiter
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ORBITAL RADIUS
0.90281 AU
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ORBITAL PERIOD
200.5 days
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ECCENTRICITY
0.03
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DETECTION METHOD
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