Amazing news for India and the world too, seems a bit surprising but our own India has discovered a planet. A team from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, for the first in Indian history has found a distant planet roughly 6 times the earth is revolving around a Sun-like star. Being said that the mass of the anonymous planet is around 27 times that of Earth, goes around the star in 19.5 days which is being claimed by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on its website.
Both the star and the planet have been located about 600 light years away from Earth and have been named EPIC 211945201b or k2-23b in short EPIC, while the host star is being called EPIC 211945201 or k2-236.
The team was led by professor Abhijit Chakraborty of PRL, Ahmedabad and with this discovery, India has joined the elite club of a handful of countries which have discovered planets around stars, said by ISRO.
This discovery of the celestial objects was made measuring the mass of the planet using the indigenously designed PRL Advance Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS) spectrograph, integrated with a 1.2-meter telescope at PRL’s Gurushikhar Observatory in Mount-Abu as per space agency.
The spectrograph is one of its kind in the country, which can measure the mass of the planet going around the star and such spectrographs just exits in some of the countries like America and Europe, that can do precise measurements.
This planet and the star were observed for almost 1.5 years by the PARAS to understand the nature of the star system. By measuring the amplitude of the wobbling host star the mass of the planet was determined which was found 27 times than the mass of earth.
According to the reports, the temperature of the planet is around 600 degree Celsius and is 7 times nearer than earth to its host star.
Although this distance might mean that the planet is uninhabitable, the discovery is still significant for understanding the formation of such super-Neptune or sub-Saturn kind of planets that are too close to the host star.
