Discovery of Saturn like planet around a star | India

Date: 22-June-2018

Discovery of new exoplanet around a star:

Discovery of Indian Exoplanet

     A team of researchers and engineers under professor. Abhijit Chakraborthy from Physical Research Laboratory (Ahmedabad), have discovered a planet which size lies between sub-Saturn and Super-Neptune. Its mass is about 27 times of Earth around a sun like star. The planet was named as EPIC-211945201b or K2-236b.

The work regarding the discovery and measurement has appeared in the Astronomical Journal of the American Astronomical Society and the article was published by IOP Publishing house.

The discovery was made by measuring the mass and size of the planet by using the indigenously developed PRL Advance Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS) spectrograph integrated with 1.2m diameter telescope located at Gurushikhar Observatory in Mount Abu, India. There are 23 such planetary systems are known to this date with masses between 10 to 70 Earth mass and size of 4 to 8 Earth radii. This discovery is very important to understand the formation of planets and planetary systems around sun like star.

With this discovery of EPIC-211945201b, India has joined a handful of countries, which have discovered planets around stars beyond our solar system.

About PARAS:

     PARAS is the first kind of spectrograph in Asia, which can measure the mass of a planet going around a star. Rare spectrograph were found all over the world which can measure such precise measurements.

References:

[1] ISRO (22-June-2018) "Discovery of a sub-Saturn like planet around a Sun-like star" Indian Space Research Organisation. Retrieved from https://www.isro.gov.in/update/22-june-2018/discovery-of-a-sub-saturn-like-planet-around-a-sun-like-star on 15-07-2018.