New planet is breaking apart, losing material equal to a Mount Everest per orbit
Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a new planet crumbling into pieces. The planet is losing material equal to one Mount Everest every time it completes an orbit.Located 140 light-years from Earth, the disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury, although it circles about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun, completing an orbit every 30.5 hours.advertisementAbout 5,800 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, have been discovered since the 1990s. Of those, only four have been observed disintegrating in orbit, as this one is.
This planet is the closest to our solar system of the four, giving scientists a unique opportunity to learn about what happens to these doomed worlds.The astronomers spotted the planet using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led mission that monitors the nearest stars for transits, or periodic dips in starlight that could be signs of orbiting exoplanets.
The disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury. (Photo: Nasa)
Its host star, a type called an orange dwarf, is smaller, cooler and dimmer than the sun, with about 70% of the sun's mass and diameter and about 20% of its luminosity. The planet orbits this star every 30.5 hours at a distance about 20 times closer than Mercury is to the sun.advertisementThe planet's surface temperature is estimated at close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,600 degrees Celsius) thanks to its close proximity to its star. As a result, the planet's surface has probably been turned to magma - molten rock.The scientists confirmed that the signal is of a tightly orbiting rocky planet that is trailing a long, comet-like tail of debris.'The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to nine million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet's entire orbit,' says Marc Hon, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.Astronomers added that the planet is disintegrating at a dramatic rate, shedding an amount of material equivalent to one Mount Everest each time it orbits its star. At this pace, given its small mass, the researchers predict that the planet may completely disintegrate in about 1 million to 2 million years.'We got lucky with catching it exactly when it's really going away. It's like on its last breath,' Avi Shporer, a collaborator on the discovery added.Trending Reel
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