Five years ago, news covered the media around the world: a team of scientists revealed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting in three days. A milestone that opened doors to new planetary configurations and was led by a scientist just 23 years old. But now that the euphoria is gone: new data and observations have led to that suggestion not reallyso the authors of the study decided to withdraw it.

Science, the same magazine that revealed the findings in 2016, now reflects on the recovery published by the group led by Kegin Wagnerfrom the University of Arizona (USA).

In their paper, they featured a gas giant planet identified as HD 131399Ab in a three -day planetary system, located about 320 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus and that would be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets to be discovered.

What is surprising, moreover, is that the findings indicate that it is on a planet where either sunlight is constant or there is 3 sunrises and sunsets per day, depending on the season (which is longer than human life). But not.

The authors now point out that, after that publication, another group made follow-up observations suggesting that “exoplanet discovery could a false positive”.

Wagner and his team consider that the main star HD 131399A has a “parallax several times larger than the suspected exoplanet, proving that the object is of background origin and not an exoplanet associated with the exoplanet in question. star system. “

Ang star parallax it is the apparent movement of a nearby star against the background of more distant stars when the Earth rotates around the Sun and serves to measure the distance that separates us from them.

With information from EFE

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