Miniature Saturn⁘ Orbiting A Red Dwarf Star - Earth.Com
The recent discovery of exoplanet TOI‑5573 b, a miniature Saturn-like planet, gives astronomers a fresh look at how planets can arise around small stars.
The newly identified world measures 0.87 times Jupiter's radius yet weighs just 0.35 Jupiter masses, yielding a Saturn‑like bulk density.
It orbits an M dwarf that is about 606 light‑years away, every 8.79 days, and at a distance of roughly 0.07 of an astronomical unit from its star.
This keeps the planet's dayside near 528 K, which is cool for a gas giant so close in.
Rachel B. Fernandes of Pennsylvania State University, and colleagues, confirmed the planet's existence using NASA's TESS photometry plus radial‑velocity work from the Habitable‑zone Planet Finder and NEID spectrographs .
The find adds to the sparse catalog of Giant Exoplanets around M‑dwarf Stars (GEMS) , a class with members having a radius of eight to fifteen times Earth's radius.
Hot Jupiters turn up around early‑type M dwarfs only about 0.27 ± 0.09 percent of the time, according to a TESS‑based census.
Rare systems such as TOI-5573 test planet‑formation theory because low‑mass disks surrounding cool stars should contain too little material to grow such bodies quickly.
Each new example helps refine models that tie disk mass, metallicity, and migration history into one picture.
The planet lies in the constellation Lynx , a quiet stretch of sky without any bright stars nearby. Its host, TOI‑5573, is faint to the naked eye, with an apparent magnitude near 15.6 in visible light.
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