{"id":113256,"date":"2020-09-21T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T19:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/astronomers-discover-an-earth-sized-pi-planet-with-a-3-14-day-orbit"},"modified":"2020-09-21T12:24:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T19:24:00","slug":"astronomers-discover-an-earth-sized-pi-planet-with-a-3-14-day-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/astronomers-discover-an-earth-sized-pi-planet-with-a-3-14-day-orbit","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers discover an Earth-sized \u2018pi planet\u2019 with a 3.14-day orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-discover-an-earth-sized-pi-planet-with-a-3-14-day-orbit.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a delightful alignment of astronomy and mathematics, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a \u201cpi Earth\u201d\u2014an Earth-sized planet that zips around its star every 3.14 days, in an orbit reminiscent of the universal mathematics constant.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers discovered signals of the planet in data taken in 2017 by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope\u2019s K2 mission. By zeroing in on the system earlier this year with SPECULOOS, a network of ground-based telescopes, the team confirmed that the signals were of a planet orbiting its star. And indeed, the planet appears to still be circling its star today, with a pi-like period, every 3.14 days.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe planet moves like clockwork,\u201d says Prajwal Niraula, a graduate student in MIT\u2019s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), who is the lead author of a paper published today in the <i>Astronomical Journal<\/i>, titled: \u201c\u03c0 Earth: a 3.14-day Earth-sized Planet from K2\u2019s Kitchen Served Warm by the SPECULOOS Team.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a delightful alignment of astronomy and mathematics, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a \u201cpi Earth\u201d\u2014an Earth-sized planet that zips around its star every 3.14 days, in an orbit reminiscent of the universal mathematics constant. The researchers discovered signals of the planet in data taken in 2017 by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}