UC Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane had to double-check his calculations. He wasn’t sure the planet he was studying could be as extreme as it seemed.
UC Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane had to double-check his calculations. He wasn’t sure the planet he was studying could be as extreme as it seemed.
Kane had never expected to learn that a planet in this faraway star system is covered with so many active volcanoes that seen from a distance, it would take on a fiery, glowing-red hue.
« It was one of those discovery moments that you think, ‘wow, it’s amazing this can actually exist, » Kane said. A paper detailing the discovery has been published in The Astronomical Journal.
Launched in 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, searches for exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—that orbit the brightest stars in the sky, including those that could support life.
Kane was studying a star system called HD 104067 about 66 light years away from our sun that was already known to harbor a giant planet. TESS had just discovered signals for a new rocky planet in that system. In gathering data about that planet, Kane unexpectedly found yet another one, bringing the total number of known planets in the system to three.
