https://phys.org/news/2023-05-astronome ... earth.html
by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org
An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a new "super-Earth" exoplanet using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The newfound alien world, designated TOI-244 b, turns out to have an unusually low density. The finding was reported in a paper published May 8 on the arXiv preprint server.
TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 6,600 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 331 have been confirmed so far.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Amadeo Castro-González of the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, Spain, has confirmed another TOI monitored by TESS. They report that a transit signal was detected in the light curve of TOI-244 (also known as GJ 1018)—a nearby bright, early type M-dwarf star of spectral type M2.5 V, nearly half the size and mass of the sun. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by radial velocity measurements conducted with the ESPRESSO spectrograph mounted on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
"Based on the transit signal detected from TESS data, we carried out an intensive radial velocity campaign with ESPRESSO in order to confirm its planetary nature, obtain a precise mass measurement, as well as to search for additional planets," the researchers wrote.