Astronomers have found the most self -destructive planet in the sky
This planet triggers rockets on its star – spending its ultimate destiny
In the impression of this artist, the planet Hip 67522 B sends a wave of energy along the magnetic field lines towards the surface of its host star – triggering a massive push when the energy reaches the surface of the star.
The stars often whip their planets with solar winds and radiation, bring them closer and closer with gravity and grab them. But a new planet has an unexpected influence – and finally self -destructive – on its star in return.
The star hip 67522 is slightly larger than our sun and shines around 408 light years in the group of stars Scorpius-Centaurus. He is 17 million years old, a young person with stellar standards, and has two orbit planets who are even younger. The most internal of these two planets, a gas giant the size of the size of the size of the size of the size of the size 67522 B, Hip 67522 orbits at a distance of less than 12 times the radius of the star – almost seven times closer than the distance from Mercury compared to the sun in our solar system. This proximity opposite, combined with the volatile adolescent nature of the Hip 67522, created a spectacle that astronomers have never seen before: a planet that triggers powerful rockets on the surface of its host star, leading to the own destruction the slow of the planet.
“In a way, we were lucky,” said Ekaterina Ilin, astrophysicist in the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron), who directed the study on the Hip 67522 system, published Wednesday in Nature. “We have taken all the star planet systems that we knew and made the front in search of enlightening rockets – intense gusts of radiation from the surface of the star.” By browsing the data collected by two space telescopes, Tess de la NASA (survey satellite exoplanet exoplanet exoplanet) and the cheops of the European space agency (characterizing exoplanet rockets), the Ilin team noticed that the hip 67522 rockets seemed to synchronize with the orbital period of its closest plan plan. And these lighting rockets were gigantic – “thousands of times more energetic than anything the sun can produce,” said Ilin.
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The planet HIP 67522 B undergoes serious consequences of lighting rockets on its host star: the atmosphere of high energy radiation explodes from the planet of low density, threatening to bring it back from a world the size of Jupiter to a world the size of a Neptune.
Janine Fohlmeister / Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
The orbit gas giant probably triggers these powerful rockets by disturbing the strong magnetic field lines of the star when it goes into orbit. This sends waves of energy down along the lines – and when these waves meet the surface of the star, an escape bursts. The magnetic curls of the star are “almost like a spring while waiting to be released,” says Ilin. “The planet only gives it this last push.” Based on the team’s observations, HIP 67522 B triggers a push once a day or two.
And this action has serious consequences for the planet itself: Ilin believes that the giant of unlucky gas obtains six times more radiation than if it would not do it if it would trigger eruptions and did not explode its own atmosphere. At this rate, Ilin’s team says that the hip 67522 B will shrink Jupiter’s size in Neptune in about 100 million years. “The shot could reduce the lifespan of the planet’s atmosphere in two,” she said.
The researchers had suspected that this type of starry interaction could occur, but they had never seen it before, explains Antoine Strugarek, astrophysicist of French alternative energy and the center of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) CEA Paris-Saclay, which was not involved in the new study. “This is the first time that we have seen very convincing evidence, such an interaction has really been detected,” he said.
Ilin says it is too early to draw large -scale conclusions from this first example of the phenomenon. As a next step, she says, the researchers can compare the hip 67522 B with the other planet of the system, which orbits a little further from the star, to calculate the quantity of mass, the most closely orbit world really loses in this process compared to that more distant, which is probably more affected than random eruptions.
Another unanswered question is exactly how the rocket triggered. “Is it a wave [of magnetic energy] Who spreads from the planet? »Ilin wonders.
But perhaps the most important question is how current the newly observed phenomenon is. For the moment, Ilin wants to focus on the search for more systems where planets induce stellar thrusts that scientists can study. “Once we understand how it works, we can make it a planet detection technique,” she said. Instead of looking for the planets themselves, researchers could seek stars that evolve following a certain scheme, which could also have planets with a self-destructive pension.
