An international team of astronomers has discovered a close-in super-Earth exoplanet in the HD 164922 planetary system.<\/p>\n
An artists impression of the super-Earth exoplanet HD 164922d. Image credit: Sci-News.com.<\/p>\n
HD 164922 is a bright G9-type star located approximately 72 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.<\/p>\n
Also known as Gliese 9613 or LHS 3353, the star is slightly smaller and less massive than the Sun and is 9.6 billion years old.<\/p>\n
HD 164922 is known to host two massive planets: the temperate sub-Neptune HD 164922c and the Saturn-mass planet HD 164922b in a wide orbit.<\/p>\n
The sub-Neptune is 12.9 times more massive than Earth, and orbits the parent star once every 75.8 days at a distance of 0.35 AU (astronomical units).<\/p>\n
The Saturn-like planet has a mass 0.3 times that of Jupiter and an orbital period of 1,201 days at a distance of 2.2 AU.<\/p>\n
In a new study, Dr. Serena Benatti from the INAF Astronomical Observatory of Palermo and colleagues searched for additional low-mass planets in the inner region of the HD 164922 system.<\/p>\n
The astronomers analyzed 314 spectra of the host star collected by HARPS-N (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere), a spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.<\/p>\n
We monitored this target in the framework of the Global Architecture of Planetary Systems (GAPS) project focused on finding close-in low-mass companions in systems with outer giant planets, they said.<\/p>\n
The team detected an additional inner super-Earth with a minimum mass of 4 times that of the Earth.<\/p>\n
Named HD 164922d, the planet orbits the star once every 12.5 days at a distance of 0.1 AU.<\/p>\n
This target will not be observed with NASAs Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS), at least in Cycle 2, to verify if it transits, the researchers said.<\/p>\n
Dedicated observations with ESAs CHarachterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) could be proposed, but they can be severely affected by the uncertainty on the transit time.<\/p>\n
The teams paper will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.<\/p>\n
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S. Benatti et al. 2020. The GAPS Programme at TNG XXIII. HD 164922 d: a close-in super-Earth discovered with HARPS-N in a system with a long-period Saturn mass companion. A&A, in press; arXiv: 2005.03368<\/p>\n
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