Indian astronomers have added another feather to their cap as they made two recent discoveries. One, a team of astronomers has found an exoplanet that is 1.4x the size of Jupiter and another, a rare class of radio stars hotter than the Sun.
A team from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) based in Ahmedabad has discovered an exoplanet 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, orbiting an aging star that is 1.5 times the Sun and is located 725 light-years away. .
In addition, another team from the Pune Center for Radio Astrophysics developed the . found a rare class of radio stars Which are hotter than the Sun with an unusually strong magnetic field and strong winds.
The new exoplanet, known as TOI 1789b, was discovered by Professor Abhijit Chakraborty and his team using the PARAS optical fiber-fed spectrograph. The exoplanets were found to have 70% of the mass and 1.4 times the size of Jupiter.
TOI 1789b orbits its Sun in just 3.2 days. Due to its proximity to its host star, the planet is extremely hot, with surface temperatures up to 2000 K.
The second discovery was made by a team based in Pune. NCRA Barnali Das, found eight rare radio stars that are hotter than the Sun.
These stars emit intense radio pulsations because of their emission behavior, which resembles a lighthouse on a pitch-dark island. They are ‘main-sequence radio pulse’ (MRPs) emitters that have powerful magnetic fields.
Surprisingly, only 15 MRPs have been detected in space so far, out of which 11 were discovered by astronomers in Pune.
The success of the study suggests that MRP may not be rare, but difficult to detect, as radio pulses appear only at particular times, and are usually only noticeable at low radio frequencies.
In addition, Indian astronomers have also observed an active galaxy that emits 10 times more X-rays than normal.
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