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02 December 2021 It is a super light weight, among the approximately 5,000 planets outside the Solar System discovered so far: it is called GJ 367 b, its mass is about half that of the Earth and it is also very fast because it rotates around its star in almost eight hours.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, was made possible thanks to NASA's Tess (Transiting Exoplanet SurveySatellite) space telescope, whose data were analyzed by the international group headed by Kristine WF Lam and Szilárd Csizmadia, of the Institute of Planetary Research of the German Space Agency (DLR).
With a diameter of just over 9,000 kilometers, the planet is barely larger than Mars, rocky, very hot and 31 light years away. Its discovery is not a simple curiosity because it shows that it is possible to study even such small and light planets in detail. "It would appear similar to Mercury," Lam observes, and his discovery could be "a step forward in the search for a second Earth."
It was possible to identify GJ 367 b with the most classic of observation methods, that of transits based on the variations in brightness caused by the passage of the planet in front of its star. The latter belongs to the most widespread family of stars, that of the red dwarfs, and its dimensions are about half that of the Sun.