A new discovery has been made in the field of astronomy with the identification of a massive brown dwarf, designated TOI-2490 b.
This brown dwarf, found by an international team of astronomers, is approximately 74 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits a sun-like star in a highly eccentric path. The details of this discovery were shared in a recent paper published on August 8 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that bridge the gap between planets and stars, with masses ranging between 13 and 80 times that of Jupiter. While many brown dwarfs have been detected, those orbiting other stars are relatively rare.
Led by Beth A. Henderson from the University of Leicester, UK, the team used the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to identify a transit signal in the light curve of TOI-2490, a G-type main sequence star situated around 872.5 light years away. The nature of the signal was confirmed to be a brown dwarf through follow-up photometric observations and radial velocity measurements.
The study reveals that TOI-2490 b is about the size of Jupiter but with a mass of 73.6 Jupiter masses, resulting in a density of 91.6 g/cm³. This brown dwarf orbits its host star every 60.33 days at a distance of approximately 0.31 AU. Its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be 464.2 K.
Notably, TOI-2490 b has an orbital eccentricity of around 0.78, making it the most eccentric brown dwarf known within the "BD desert"—a region where brown dwarfs are scarce around main sequence stars within about 3 AU of their host.
The researchers suggest that TOI-2490 b likely formed with this high eccentricity through stellar formation processes, sharing similar metallicity and age with its parent star. They also observed that the irradiation temperature of TOI-2490 b varies dramatically by about 1,000 K (ranging from 545 K to 1,552 K) as it travels along its orbit, a phenomenon that warrants further study.
Regarding its host star, TOI-2490, it is similar in mass to the Sun, with a radius of approximately 1.1 solar radii. The star is estimated to be 7.9 billion years old, has a metallicity of 0.32 dex, and an effective temperature of 5,558 K.
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#TomaszNowakowski , #Phys_org
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