Discovered a planet that does not exist in the solar system. It is very close to us, only 73 light-years away.

NASA’s planet-hunting satellite TESS has discovered a missing planet in our solar system. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched in 2018 and discovered three planetary worlds around a star near the sun. Stephen Kane, associate professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside, said: This new star system called TESS Object of Interest, or TOI-270, is exactly what this satellite was originally designed for. A study describing TOI-270 has been published in Nature Astronomy.

Of the three new exoplanets, one is rocky and slightly larger than Earth, while the other two are gaseous and about twice the size of Earth. Not only is the smaller planet within the habitable zone, but the star TOI-270 is nearby, making it appear even brighter.

The habitable zone is a distance from a star that is warm enough for a liquid water ocean to form on the planet. It's also "quiet," meaning it has few flares and scientists can more easily observe the star and its orbiting planets. It's very rare to find such a planet in the habitable zone, and far fewer around a quiet star, so it's very rare.

There is no such planet in the solar system. In the solar system, there are either rocky planets like Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars, or larger planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. They are dominated by gas rather than land. The solar system does not have planets half the size of Neptune, although they are common around other stars. "OI-270 will soon allow us to study this "missing link" between rocky Earth-like planets and small, gas-dominated Neptunes," said principal investigator Maximilian Gunther, a Torres postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

Because here all these types of planets formed in the same system. Follow-up observations of the star system are planned for next year when the James Webb Space Telescope is launched, which will be able to measure the composition of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon monoxide in TOI-270's atmosphere. These observations help determine whether a planet once had a liquid water ocean and whether it had conditions suitable for life as we know it. Although TOI-270 is far enough away from Earth that no one would travel there, TOI-270, which is 73 light-years away, is still considered very close. Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, and it is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.

So, 73 light-years means it is one of our nearby stars. TESS is a NASA astrophysics exploration mission led and operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The research team hopes that further studies will reveal additional planets in addition to the three currently known. The smaller planet is unlikely to harbor life because its surface is probably too warm to support liquid water. But other planets farther from their stars may have cooler temperatures, allowing water to collect on their surfaces.