The NEID Earth Twin Survey has made a remarkable discovery, unveiling the first exoplanet orbiting the nearby star HD 86728. This significant finding paves the way for the detection of more low-mass alien worlds, bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of discovering Earth-like planets.
NEID’s Pioneering Exploration
The NEID Earth Twin Survey (NETS)is a new program to leverage the state-of-the-art NEID spectrograph in its search for low-mass exo-planets orbiting some of the nearest and brightest stars. These are meant to break ground for precision radial velocity measurements, installed finally on the WIYN 3.5 m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
Now, the first exoplanet discovery from the NETS program has been announced by a team of astronomers led by Arvind F. Gupta (U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory). The discovery is significant, as it shows that NEID can interrogate the molecular fingerprint of life from other Earthlike planets orbiting remote stars.
Introducing HD 86728 b
HD 86728 b orbits the bright star HD 86728, located around 48.6 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. The scientists examined NETS’s initial three years of observations on this target well, thus the exoplanet confirmation.
HD 86728Planet b orbits its host star with a period of just over 31 days, making it orbit much closer at around. Based on these observations, the planet would have a theoretical mass of about 9.16 Earth masses, which makes it a comparatively low-mass world. What is more, this class of exoplanets contains over ninety percent identified for a given mass and orbital period are part of planetary systems containing two or more planets. However the wide separation of HD 86728 b suggests that it’s a singleton (additional observations are needed to confirm that it doesn’t have terra incognita in the trail).
The host star, HD 86728 is, in turn, a Sun-like G3V-type star of about ~1.24 solar radii and with a mass equal to the one for our sun. The effective temperature of the star is about 5,610 K and metallicity level is 0.2 dex.
Conclusion
The first planet found in this effort, HD 86728 b is a weighty distant sibling to the terrestrial worlds that many missions are hunting. That conclusion demonstrates what the NEID spectrograph can have the ability to and lays the groundwork for discovering extra Earth-like worlds around close by stars. As the survey soldiers on, there could be tantalizing Earth twins that lie beyond every new “exoplanet candidate” to come into view of astronomers.
