New exotic planets with unique features are discovered in their thousands every year and expand our understanding of the universe. One such discovery is a planet that is roughly the same size of the earth that is unique in that it rotates its dwarf star in Pi number, which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
The discovery indicated that the planet was in close proximity to its start and only took 3.14 days to revolve around the star, which is close to 3.14159 constant Pi number.
The findings were published on Astronomical Journal and indicated that the planet was discovered by analyzing data that had been taken 2017 by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope‘s K2 mission. They indicated that they discovered what appeared to be a planet orbiting a cool, small star. This would later be confirmed, when they used The Search for habitable Planets Eclipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars, or SPECULOOS, which is a network of ground-based telescopes to observe the planet.
Discovery of an exotic planet
They discovered an exotic planet, which they called K2-315b, that was roughly the same size as earth, and that orbited a low mass star that is about a fifth of the sun.
Prajwal Niraula, an MIT graduate student indicated that the planet was moving like a clock during its rotation. He indicated that after noticing the time taken by the planet to rotate around its planet, they could not help but connect the number of days it took for the rotation and the constant pi.
Scientists working on the project, however, indicated that K2-315b did not show any signs of life, nor did they expect any type of life to survive in such an environment. However, they also gave a glimpse of hope by stating that the planet would offer valuable atmospheric weather that will be useful in our understanding of how the universe works. For the scientific community, the discovery of K2-315b was big due to its size being roughly like ours, temperatures and how fast it was rotating.
Featured image by Pixabay
