Amateur Astronomers Discovered a Saturn-Like Exoplanet Orbiting the Red Dwarf Star Gliese 3470

Amateur astronomers from the Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project have announced the discovery of a new extrasolar planet candidate orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 3470. The detection was made using a telescope at the OKSky Observatory in Kiowa, Oklahoma. GJ 3470 is a red dwarf star located 98 light-years away in the constellation of Cancer. The star has around half the mass and size of the Sun. Astronomers had previously detected a Neptune-like exoplanet around Gliese 3470. Named Gliese 3470b, it has a mass 13.9 times that of the Earth, a radius 4.4 times that of our planet, and an orbital period of just 3.3 days. The newfound planet, Gliese 3470c, has a radius of 9.2 times that of Earth, making it a bit bigger that Saturn. It has an orbital period of 66 days and resides in the habitable zone of the Gliese 3470 system. The researchers detected three transits of Gliese 3470c. The first one on December 23, 2019, the second one on February 27, 2020, and the third one on May 3, 2020. They also detected twelve other transits that could belong to different exoplanets but they were not able to estimate any orbital period. Our candidate for Gliese 3470c still has to be confirmed by other professional observatories but the diversity of potential transits we found suggests a high likelihood of existing more exoplanets in the system apart from Gliese 3470b,” they said. If confirmed, Gliese 3470c would be the first exoplanet totally discovered by amateur astronomers. A paper reporting the discovery was published online. on the arXiv.org preprint server https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07373 http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/gj_3470_c/



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