Star Counterfeiter: How a Twin Mimicked a Planet ⚡ экспресс
Original: "Vetting and False Positive Analysis of TOI 864.01: Evidence for a Likely Hierarchical Eclipsing Binary Masked by Dilution"
A tiny exoplanet's signal turned out to be a clever illusion from a double star.
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The TESS telescope caught a signal of a tiny planet around a dim star: the drop in light lasted half a day. But super-sharp images revealed a previously invisible twin of the star. It turned out that the 'planet' was merely an eclipse in this pair. Such illusions are the price of hunting for worlds around distant suns.
🎯 Every third planet candidate from space surveys turns out to be an illusion, but paradoxically: it is these fakes that perfect the technology for discovering real worlds.
🎬 The situation resembles the search for the planet Vulcan, which was vainly sought between Mercury and the Sun — it was also an illusion, dispelled by the theory of relativity.