If the galaxy was the Empire State Building, we can only see and detect the planets next to stars that have apartments on our floor," study co-author Enric Palle of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias told reporters during a press briefing. "We just discovered our neighbor." 100 light-years may sound like quite a distance, but cosmically speaking, the system is incredibly close to us.
Initially detected in 2020 by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers realized early on that they were dealing with at least two so-called sub-Neptunes, which are planets about two to three times as big as Earth and blanketed by apparently puffy atmospheres. The northern sky was to disappear below the horizon soon after TESS' detection, meaning the team only had a month or so to confirm the discovery using ground-based telescopes, said study co-author Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago.
But then COVID hit, and "pretty much everything came to a halt," Luque said, adding that data analysis also took longer than anticipated. "It was bittersweet when we finally completed all the analysis, including deducing the properties of the planets. But the fact that we figured it out only shows the value of archives like TESS."
For example, the star system could be useful for studying the atmospheres of exoplanets, and it adds to the growing catalog of planetary systems that challenge existing theories of planet formation and migration. Importantly, the system's relative proximity to us means future observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, could conduct follow-up studies to characterise the planets' atmospheres in even more detail.
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