A habitable-zone ocean planet has been discovered orbiting a red dwarf in a binary star system 100 light-years away from Earth, and could provide a tantalizing target for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) to study.
The exoplanet, cataloged as TOI-1452b, was initially spotted by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), but because TESS was unable to resolve the binary system into its two stars, the transiting object's precise nature was uncertain. So, a team of astronomers led by Charles Cadieux, who is a Ph.D. student at the Université de Montréal in Canada, followed up on it.
First, the researchers commandeered the PESTO (an acronym of the French words for "extra-solar planets in transit and occultation") instrument on the 1.6-meter telescope at the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM) in Quebec, Canada, to resolve the two stars of the binary system.
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