While observing the HD 23472 star system using the ESPRESSO spectrograph, scientists found three super-Earths
Photograph of the planet Mercury taken by NASA's MESSENGER Wide-Angle Camera (WAC).
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Purpose of the study published in the journalAstronomy & Astrophysics, was to characterize the composition of small planets and understand how it changes depending on the position of the planet, temperature and properties of stars. It turned out that the system consists of three super-Earths with their own atmosphere and, surprisingly, two super-mercuries.
Density of known rocky planets depending on the estimated mass fraction of iron in the silicate of the protoplanetary disk.
The black solid line shows the correlation forknown exoplanets (blue dots), excluding potential supermercuries (brown dots). The black symbols represent the planets of our solar system - from top to bottom Mercury, Mars, Earth and Venus.
Photo: Barros et al., 2022
Of the five planets in the HD 23472 system, three have masssmaller than Earth. These are among the lightest exoplanets and their masses were measured using the radial velocity method with ESPRESSO. The spectrograph was installed on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Radius versus mass plot of exoplanet HD 23472 (black dots) compared to other known exoplanets.
Earth (blue star) and Venus (yellow star) are shown for comparison.
Dashed lines represent mass-radius models for different planetary compositions.
Photo: Barros et al., 2022
The planet Mercury is different in the solar systema relatively larger core and a relatively smaller mantle than other planets, but astronomers don't know why. Surprisingly, scientists have recently found other exoplanets with similar characteristics around other stars. They were called supermercuries.
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Cover photo: Artist's impression of a five-exoplanet system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech