Latest news with #Jupiter-size
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Exoplanet is shrinking before the X-ray eyes of NASA's Chandra spacecraft: 'The future for this baby planet doesn't look great'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have witnessed a distant, Jupiter-size world "shrinking" as its host star bombards it with heavy radiation. The extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," is named TOI 1227 b and is a cosmic baby at just 8 million years old (remember, Earth is around 4.5 billion years old). And, incredibly, the world orbits its star at a distance of just 8.2 million miles, a fraction of the distance between the sun and Mercury, with a year that lasts just 28 days. This proximity means the star, named TOI 1227 and located around 330 light-years away, is blasting the planet with powerful X-rays. This radiation is stripping the exoplanet's atmosphere away; in fact, the atmosphere of TOI 1227 b is likely to be completely gone in around 1 billion years. This will reduce the exoplanet to nothing more than a small, rocky and barren core. The team behind this research estimates TOI 1227 b will have ultimately lost the equivalent of two Earths' worth of mass by the conclusion of its transformation. As of now, the world has a mass around 17 times that of Earth's. "It's almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet," Attila Varga, study team leader and a researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), said in a statement. "The planet's atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it's receiving from its star." While this exoplanet's parent star is less massive than the sun (with about 10% the mass of our star) and is cooler and fainter in optical light, it is actually brighter than our star in X-rays. "A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they're receiving," team member and RIT scientist Joel Kastner said in the statement. "We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star." The team used Chandra to determine just how much X-ray radiation is roasting TOI 1227 b. The researchers then used computer modeling to assess the impact of this radiation on the exoplanet and its atmosphere. This revealed that roughly every two centuries, the world loses the equivalent of Earth's entire atmosphere from its own atmosphere. "The future for this baby planet doesn't look great," Alexander Binks, a study team member and researcher at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, said in the statement. "From here, TOI 1227 b may shrink to about a tenth of its current size and will lose more than 10 percent of its weight." Related Stories: — The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its 1st exoplanet and snapped its picture (image) — Astronomers discover origins of mysterious double hot Jupiter exoplanets: 'It is a dance of sorts' — NASA exoplanet-hunting spacecraft and citizen scientists discover a cool new alien world The researchers estimated the age of TOI 1227 b using estimates of its host star's velocity through space and comparing them with the speed of nearby stellar populations with known ages. The team also compared the surface brightness of TOI 1227 with models of stellar evolution. TOI 1227 b stands out from other exoplanets aged less than 50 million years because, among the set, it seems to have the longest year and a host star with the lowest mass. The team's research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and appears as a preprint on the repository site arXiv. Solve the daily Crossword
Scientific American
02-07-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Astronomers Found the Most Self-Destructive Planet in the Sky
Stars often whip their planets with solar winds and radiation, pull them ever closer with gravity and sear them with heat. But a newfound planet exerts an unexpectedly strong—and ultimately self-destructive—influence on its star in return. The star HIP 67522 is slightly larger than our sun and shines roughly 408 light-years away in the Scorpius-Centaurus star cluster. It's 17 million years old, a youngster by stellar standards, and has two orbiting planets that are even younger. The innermost of these two planets, a Jupiter-size gas giant called HIP 67522 b, orbits HIP 67522 at a distance of less than 12 times the star's radius—almost seven times closer than Mercury's distance from the sun in our Solar System. This in-your-face proximity, combined with HIP 67522's volatile teenage nature, has created a spectacle astronomers have never seen before: a planet that triggers powerful flares on the surface of its host star, leading to the planet's own slow destruction. 'In a way, we got lucky,' says Ekaterina Ilin, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), who led the study on the HIP 67522 system, published on Wednesday in Nature. 'We took all the star-planet systems that we knew of and just went ahead looking for flares—sudden intense bursts of radiation coming from the star's surface.' Parsing through the data gathered by two space-based telescopes, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the European Space Agency's CHEOPS (Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite), Ilin's team noticed that HIP 67522's flares seemed to be synchronized with its closest planet's orbital period. And those flares were gigantic—'thousands of times more energetic than anything the sun can produce,' Ilin says. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The orbiting gas giant likely sparks these powerful flares by perturbing the star's strong magnetic field lines as it passes by in its orbit. This sends waves of energy downward along the lines—and when those waves meet the star's surface, a flare bursts out. The star's magnetic loops are 'almost like a spring waiting to be let go,' Ilin says. 'The planet's just giving it this last push.' Based on the team's observations, HIP 67522 b triggers a flare once every Earth day or two. And this action has severe consequences for the planet itself: Ilin estimates the unlucky gas giant gets six times more radiation than it would if it wasn't triggering flares and blasting away its own atmosphere. At this pace, Ilin's team says, HIP 67522 b will shrink from Jupiter's size to Neptune's in about 100 million years. 'Flaring might cut the lifetime of the planet's atmosphere in half,' she says. Researchers had suspected this type of star-planet interplay might occur, but they had never previously seen it, says Antoine Strugarek, an astrophysicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission's (CEA's) center CEA Paris-Saclay, who was not involved in the new study. 'This is the first time we see very convincing evidence such interaction has been actually detected,' he says. Ilin says it's too early to draw far-reaching conclusions from this first example of the phenomenon. As a next step, she says, researchers can compare HIP 67522 b with the other planet in the system, which orbits a bit farther from the star, to calculate how much mass the more closely orbiting world is actually losing through this process compared with the more distant one, which is likely only hit with random flares. Another unanswered question is exactly how the flare triggering works. 'Is it a wave [of magnetic energy] that propagates from the planet?' Ilin wonders. She suggests that what happens could be similar to an effect that has been seen on the sun: smaller solar flares sometimes perturb nearby magnetic loops and tip them over the edge to snap and produce a larger flare. But perhaps the most important question is how common the newly observed phenomenon is. For now, Ilin wants to focus on finding more systems where planets induce stellar flares that scientists can study. 'Once we figure out how it works, we can turn it into a planet-detection technique,' she says. Instead of searching for the planets themselves, researchers could look for stars that flare following a certain pattern—suggesting they, too, might have planets with a self-destructive bent.
Ammon
20-02-2025
- Science
- Ammon
3D map of exoplanet atmosphere shows wacky climate
Ammon News - Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have mapped the 3D structure of the layered atmosphere of one such ultra-hot Jupiter-size exoplanet, revealing powerful winds that create intricate weather patterns across that atmosphere. A companion paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics reported on the unexpected identification of titanium in the exoplanet's atmosphere as well. As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock. Like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler identifies planets using the transit method. This works for systems in which the planets orbit in a plane that takes them between their host star and Earth. As this occurs, the planet blocks a small fraction of the starlight that we see from Earth (or nearby orbits). If these dips in light occur with regularity, they're diagnostic of something orbiting the star. The frequency of the dips in the star's light tells us how long an orbit takes, which tells us how far the planet is from its host star. That, combined with the host star's brightness, tells us how much incoming light the planet receives, which will influence its temperature. (The range of distances at which temperatures are consistent with liquid water is called the habitable zone.) And we can use that, along with how much light is being blocked, to figure out how big the planet is. Last year, astronomers discovered an unusual Earth-size exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. And at about the same time, a different group discovered a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter. This latest research relied on observational data collected by the European South Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope, specifically, a spectroscopic instrument called ESPRESSO that can process light collected from the four largest VLT telescope units into one signal. The target exoplanet, WASP-121b—aka Tylos—is located in the Puppis constellation about 900 light-years from Earth. One year on Tylos is equivalent to just 30 hours on Earth, thanks to the exoplanet's close proximity to its host star. Since one side is always facing the star, it is always scorching, while the exoplanet's other side is significantly colder.
