A TEAM of citizen scientists and astronomers has found a planet the size of Jupiter that NASA missed.
The team announced the discovery of the exoplanet, which floats outside of our solar system, last week in a new study published in The Astronomical Journal.
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The gas giant has been designated TOI-2180 b and is located 379 light-years away from Earth.
It takes TOI-2180 b approximately 261 days to orbit its G5 host star — much longer than other Jovian-like exoplanets.
The temperature on the exoplanet’s mostly gassy surface is slightly warmer than room temperature on Earth (about 76 degrees Fahrenheit).
Until recently, evidence of the exoplanet’s existence remained hidden even from NASA scientists as it was buried deep in data collected by the agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
TESS spots exoplanets by detecting small and patterned dips in a star’s brightness as the planet transits between the spacecraft and the star.
According to the study, the instrument had actually collected data on TOI-2180 b in June 2020.
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However, because the data only consists of a “single-transit event,” meaning the exoplanet only crossed paths with starlight once, NASA algorithms were not able to detect it.
The team of citizen scientists, on the other hand, were able to discover the exoplanet by using a downloadable software called LcTools, which allowed them to manually sift through TESS data.
“This is one area where humans are still beating code,” Paul Dalba, U.C. Riverside astronomer and lead author of the aforementioned study, said in a statement.
“The manual effort that they put in is really important and really impressive because it’s actually hard to write code that can go through a million light curves and identify single-transit events reliably,” he added.
While TOI-2180 b’s orbital period remains a bit uncertain, astronomers predict TESS will spot the planet again sometime in February.
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