Artist impression of the planetary system around the star LHS 1903 (IMAGE)
Caption
LHS 1903 is a small red M-dwarf star that is cooler and shines less brightly than our Sun. Scientists used telescopes in space and on Earth to discover four planets orbiting LHS 1903. With those telescopes, they classified the three closest planets to the star as the innermost being rocky, and the two that follow it gas giants.
In a recent study, scientists used ESA’s Cheops satellite to investigate the fourth planet in this system. They noted that it is much smaller and further away from its star than the other planets and discovered that it might be rocky, like Venus. This is surprising because a planet order of rocky-gaseous-gaseous-rocky in a planetary system is unusual and rarely observed in the Universe.
Note that the distances and sizes of the planets are not to scale – the outer fourth planet is much smaller than the other three planets in the system.
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence, Credit: ESA
Credit
ESA
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CC BY-SA