Super-Earth exoplanets more common across universe than thought: Study
Researchers came to the conclusion that super-Earths can exist as far from their host star as our gas giants are from the sun."Scientists knew there were more small planets than big planets, but in this study, we were able to show that within this overall pattern, there are excesses and deficits," said Andrew Gould, co-author of the study and professor emeritus of astronomy at The Ohio State University.
Researchers have also stressed that it can be relatively easy to locate worlds that orbit close to their star, planets with wider paths can be difficult to detect. Still, scientists further estimated that for every three stars, there should be at least one super-Earth present with a Jupiter-like orbital period, suggesting these massive worlds are extremely prevalent across the universe.Published in the journal Science, the study highlights that exoplanets classified as super-Earths are commonly observed on short-period orbits, close to their host stars, but their abundance on wider orbits is poorly constrained. Gravitational microlensing is sensitive to exoplanets on wide orbits."We observed the microlensing event OGLE-2016-BLG-0007, which indicates an exoplanet with a planet-to-star mass ratio roughly double the Earth-Sun mass ratio, on an orbit longer than Saturn's," said researchers in the study."We combined this event with a larger sample from a microlensing survey to determine the distribution of mass ratios for planets on wide orbits. We infer that there are ~0.35 super-Earth planets per star on Jupiter-like orbits. The observations are most consistent with a bimodal distribution, with separate peaks for super-Earths and gas giants. We suggest that this reflects differences in their formation processes."
The findings in this study were made via microlensing, an observational effect that occurs when the presence of mass warps the fabric of space-time to a detectable degree. When a foreground object, such as a star or planet, passes between an observer and a more distant star, light is curved from the source, causing an apparent increase in the object's brightness that can last anywhere from a few hours to several months, according to a press release. Researchers stressed that astronomers can use these fluctuations, or bumps, in brightness to help locate alien worlds unlike our own. In this case, microlensing signals were used to locate OGLE-2016-BLG-0007, a super-Earth with a mass ratio roughly double that of Earth's and an orbit wider than Saturn's.
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