Bulgarian astronomers discover a new super-Earth

An international team with leading Bulgarian participation - astronomers working on the EXO-RESTART project at the Department of Astronomy, Faculty of Physics at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” - has discovered a new exoplanet of the “super-Earth” type orbiting the star GJ 1137, better known as Makondo, the university announced.

The discovery was made through the analysis of the star’s long-period magnetic activity and is described in a scientific paper accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The lead author of the study is doctoral student Denitsa Stoeva from the Department of Astronomy.

The newly discovered planet, designated GJ 1137c, is located about 91 light-years from Earth and orbits its star in 9.4 days. Its mass is more than five times that of the Earth, placing it in the category of “super-Earths” - planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

In their work, the scientists used 140 observations conducted with the HARPS spectrograph on a telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

Edited by Miglena Ivanova