The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) made a stunning discovery, as per a release on its website, a team of ISRO scientists have discovered a sub-Saturn or super-Neptune size planet. The team have discovered the planet from its Physical Research Laboratory (PRO) in Ahmedabad.
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The planet’s mass is about 27 times that of the Earth, and its radius is 6 times that of the Earth’s. It rotates around a Sun-like star and will be known as EPIC 211945201b or K2-236b.
ISRO says the following about how the discovery was made:
The discovery was made by measuring the mass of the planet using the indigenously designed “PRL Advance Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search” (PARAS) spectrograph integrated with 1.2 m Telescope at PRL’s Gurushikhar Observatory in Mount Abu, India. Only 23 such planetary systems (including this discovery) are known to this date with masses between 10 and 70 Earth mass and size of 4 to 8 Earth radii with such precise measurement of mass.
The space agency says that the discovery is very important for understanding the formation mechanism of such super-Neptune or sub-Saturn kind of planets, that are too close to the host star and as well as planet formations around Sun-like stars.
The discovery also puts India in an exclusive club. ISRO writes:
With this discovery, India has joined a handful of countries, which have discovered planets around stars beyond our solar system. Further, PARAS is the first of its kind spectrograph in Asia, which can measure the mass of a planet going around a star. Very few spectrographs exist around the world that can make such precise measurements.