TESS Finds Related Stars Have Young Exoplanets

Thanks to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international collaboration of astronomers has identified four exoplanets, worlds beyond our solar system, orbiting a pair of related young stars called TOI 2076 and TOI 1807. These worlds may provide scientists with a glimpse of a little-understood stage of planetary evolution. TOI 2076 and TOI 1807 reside over 130 light-years away with some 30 light-years between them, which places the stars in the northern constellations of Boötes and Canes Venatici, respectively. Both are K-type stars, or dwarf stars more orange than our Sun, and around 200 million years old, or less than 5% the Sun’s age. In 2017, using data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Gaia satellite, scientists showed that the stars are traveling through space in the same direction. Astronomers think the stars are too far apart to be orbiting each other, but their shared motion suggest they are related, born from the same cloud of gas. Both TOI 2076 and TOI 1