from the now-it's-easier-to-get-off-this-world dept.
HATSouth discovers four 'hot Jupiter' exoplanets
An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of four new 'hot Jupiter' extrasolar worlds by the HATSouth survey. The newly found exoplanets received designations HATS-50b through HATS-53b. The finding is presented in a paper published December 12 on arXiv.org.
The Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) Exoplanet Survey is a network of 24 robotic wide-field telescopes. The telescopes are distributed over three locations in the southern hemisphere (Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the H.E.S.S. site in Namibia, and Siding Spring Observatory in Australia). The primary goal of the HATSouth survey is to discover and characterize a large number of transiting extrasolar planets, reaching out to long periods and down to small planetary radii.
To date, HATSouth has identified nearly 2,000 candidate transiting alien worlds of which more than 40 were confirmed as planets. Now, a group of researchers led by Thomas Henning of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, reports the discovery of four new exoplanets, expanding the list of exoworlds found by HATSouth.
We report the discovery of four close-in transiting exoplanets, HATS-50 through HATS-53, discovered using the HATSouth three-continent network of homogeneous and automated telescopes. These new exoplanets belong to the class of hot Jupiters and orbit G-type dwarf stars, with brightness in the range V=12.5-14.0 mag. While HATS-53 has many physical characteristics similar to the Sun, the other three stars appear to be metal rich, larger and more massive. Three of the new exoplanets, namely HATS-50, HATS-51 and HATS-53, have low density and similar orbital period. Instead, HATS-52 is more dense and has a shorter orbital period. It also receives an intensive radiation from its parent star and, consequently, presents a high equilibrium temperature. HATS-50 shows a marginal additional transit feature consistent with an ultra-short period hot super Neptune, which will be able to be confirmed with TESS photometry.
