Scientists have detected an hidden alien planet in examining the orbits of the known worlds in the Star system, known as Kepler-139.
The new exoplanet, called Kepler-139F, is a gigantic world approximately twice the mass of Neptune and 35 times the mass of the earth, and takes 355 days to orbit their star, astronomers reported magazines. Despite its giant size, Kepler-139F had evaded detection.
This is because the initial performance of NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which discovered almost 3,000 planets in its nine years of operation, disturbances in the transition in the world, fit between its star and earth. The star’s resulting attenuation allowed astronomers to identify planets and calculate their size. But Kepler could not see the planets traveling above or below the wedge of the space between him and the star, so any atypical brave remained invisible.
But if the hidden world was part of a multiplane system, astronomers could try to find it despite their inclined orbit. Kepler-139 has three super rock transit; Later a giant gas was discovered. The gaps in their orbits suggested that other worlds could be present. The precise measurements of the orbits allowed astronomers to infer the existence of at least one more planet.
“The problem is not to find exactly non-transit planets, but to find situations in which we can deduce where the planet is not transit,” Caleb Lammers, a student graduated in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences of Princeton and ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Discovering Kepler-139F
The initial identification of Kepler of a world was followed by observations from the ground. Using radial speed (RV), astronomers could measure how much a planet threw on their star, which allowed them to determine the mass of the planet. RV measurements could also reveal new worlds, as happened with the external gas giant, Kepler-139E.
At the same time, each planet is taken not only by its star but also by other planets in the system, regardless of whether that planet can be seen from Earth. These pulls can affect how quickly they transmit a planet, thus creating “transit synchronization variations (TTV). These variations in transit planets can reveal worlds that do not cross the star.
“When TTV observes that they cannot be attributed to known planets, it may be quite sure that there is an invisible body in the system,” Lammers said.
Lammers and his colleague Joshua Winn, participating scientist of the Kepler team and co -author of the study, looked for gaps in known systems. Then, they used RV and TTV measurements to find a lost world, reviewing the existing TTVs based on Kepler-139E 2023 discovery.
“What was different in the case of Kepler-139 is that we had precise radio speed observations that did not conclude the point towards a new planet on their own,” Lammers said. Combined with the TTVs, the observations revealed a fifth planet, Kepler-139F, hidden between the outermost superport and the giant.
The new discovery also helped answer a question about Kepler-139E. The original Kepler-139C reports, the most external superport, provided an unusually large density for a planet of subneptano size.
The discrepancy occurred because they are authors who did not know about Kepler139F, so they had attributed part of their attraction in their star to Kepler-139C. The new data suggest a more typical density for Kepler-139C while leaving the densities for Keepler-139d and Keepler-139b Essentiaty without changes. These reviews provide indirect evidence of Kepler-139F, Lammers said.
There may be other hidden worlds around Kepler-139. “It is still possible that there are other invisible planets in the system,” Lammers said, pointing out the prominent gap between planets B and C. “The challenge is to find them!”
Hidden worlds
Both Kepler’s Exoplanet hunting mission and NASA, the satellite of the Transitation Exoplanets Survey (Tess), were sensitive to the planets that orbited closer to their star. It is more likely that these internal worlds make many transits, allowing scientists to confirm the existence of the planet. But the passenger of planets with broader orbits made only a handful of passes, so they were more challenges to observe and confirm.
At the same time, the RV method tends to be biased towards larger planets, because the more massive a world is, the stronger pull its star. Proximity helps; The pull of the planet is amplified to the square inverse of its distance. Therefore, a planet twice will have only a quarter of gravitational attraction. That is why many of the first discovered exoplanets were worlds in the size of Jupiter who surrounded his star in just a few days.
All these factors make it more difficult to discover smaller planets that are further, in part if they do not travel their star. But when combining transits, stainless steel and TTV, astronomers can find hidden and hidden worlds that orbit their star’s party.
“It is likely that many planetary systems receive invisible worlds, spicy in their external regions,” Lammers said.
But soon, it will be more difficult for those worlds to hide. In 2026, the European Space Agency will launch its planetary mission Transits and Oscillations of Stars (Plato), which will carry out its own planet survey in transit, as well as review the Kepler field. By providing additional transit times for the planets detected by Kepler more than a decade later, Plato will improve TTV measurements to allow the discovery of more misaligned worlds.
“In the coming years, the technique of detection of the planet TTV will accelerate dramatically by Plato’s mission,” Lammars said.
