A rising exoplanet will one day meet a fiery demise
Like a golf ball rounding a hole, the planet Kepler-1658b is falling closer and closer to its star — that is.
Scientists are watching exoplanet noted the orbital period around its mature or “evolving” parent star It is shrinking over time, indicating that the planets are getting closer and closer to a deadly collision with their star.
“We had previously detected evidence of exoplanets heading toward their stars, but we had never before seen such a planet around an evolving star,” Shreyas Visapragada, an exoplanet scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-author of a new study on observations, said in a statement. statment (Opens in a new tab).
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It is difficult to determine the orbital decay of exoplanets. This process is so slow that astronomers have to wait to see many transits of an exoplanet in front of its star. When a planet passes its star, the star appears dimmer in perspective Land; Astronomers who observe frequent transits can track that dimming to reconstruct the distant planet’s activities, including its orbital period. Fortunately for Vesapragada and his colleagues, Kepler-1658b’s orbital period is incredibly short at 3.8 days, so transits happen frequently.
Kepler-1658b is consideredHot Jupiter,” or an exoplanet with a similar mass and size to Jupiter, but a much higher temperature due to its proximity to its star. First spotted by NASA’s retired exoplanet hunter Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, but it has not been confirmed that it is an exoplanet Until 2019.
However, scientists have been constantly observing the exoplanet ever since Kepler discovered it, first using Kepler, and then Palomar ObservatoryHale Telescope in California, and then NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Telescope (he-goat) launched in 2018 to continue the search for distant planets. During those 13 years, the trio’s instruments recorded a steady decrease in the orbital period of Kepler-1658b: 131 milliseconds per year.
Visapragada and his colleagues now hypothesize that the orbital decay is caused by tidal interactions between an exoplanet and its star — the same kind of interaction that affects the Earth-star relationship. Moon. However, in our case, the Earth and Moon have become more distant due to tidal interactions. In the case of Kepler-1658b, the exoplanet is approaching its star.
“Now that we have evidence for a planet orbiting an evolving star, we can really start to improve our models of tidal physics,” Visapragada said. “The Kepler-1658 system can serve as a celestial laboratory in this way for years to come, and with any luck, there will be more such laboratories soon.”
The research is described in a paper Published Monday (December 19) in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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