Polish research project, scientists have discovered a land of two suns – Polish Radio

  photo: NASA / vision of the artist.
 

Information about the discovery was published in the prestigious American journal “Science”.

A new planetary system bears the OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LB. The distance of the planet from the star is comparable to the distance Earth-Sun. The second of the stars of the binary system is 15 times farther while.

mass of the planet is small – exceeds the mass of the planet only twice. As the astronomers of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, the two stars of a binary system have very little mass. They are in turn smaller than the Sun – have only about 10-15 percent. the mass of the star, which means that they emit much less energy.

On a newly discovered planet, not the conditions are similar to Earth’s. It is extremely cold. It is likely to prevail on the temperature not exceeding minus 200 degrees Celsius. The body is not therefore called. area of ​​life.

planetary system OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LB is located about 3500 light years from Earth. Its existence was discovered by microlensing observations by 1.3-meter Telescope of Warsaw in the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

The discovery is important for the very important issues of modern astronomy for the existence of terrestrial planets in binary systems of stars. It turns out that their existence in such unusual circumstances, it is possible.

Gravitational microlensing occurs when near the line between the observer on Earth and a distant star, will be another object, such as another star or planet. Its gravitational field bends the light of a distant star, acting like a lens. As a result, we observe changes in brightness of distant stars.

– Observations of newly discovered planetary system OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LB, contain visible eye and not doubting the effects of the presence in the system of the planet and two stars. That’s why this discovery is very reliable and used for the detection of gravitational microlensing technique is becoming a new technique for exploration of planets in binary systems “- says team leader Professor OGLE. Andrzej Udalski.

Polish OGLE project has been operating since 1992 and is run by the Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory. Team leader is prof. Andrzej Udalski. So far, the OGLE team has published more than 350 scientific papers that have been used in over a thousand works of other scientists and cited about 14,000 times.

(ew / PAP)