A newly discovered world from deep space surprised astronomers. “It looks weird”

An aptly named exoplanet TIC365102760 b literally surprised astronomers. This deep-space world is hotter, smaller and older than experts expect. It is located 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

The newly discovered planet is six times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. In turn, the parent star is a red giant, which is the next stage in the evolution of stars like our Sun. The planet revolves around its star in only 4.2 days.

This close orbit is what makes this world exist Extremely hot (That’s why it got another name: Phoenix). The high temperature and constant stream of particles coming from the star should strip the planet’s entire atmosphere, but that doesn’t happen.

The planet Phoenix is ​​6.2 times larger and 19.2 times more massive than the blue planet, so it is similar in size to Earth. Neptune. It has previously been observed that larger, younger planets of this type lose atmospheres due to their orbits close to their stars.

– This planet is not evolving as we thought. It seems It has a much larger and less dense atmosphere than we expected for these systems. Sam Grunblatt, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, said the big question is how this planet managed to maintain an atmosphere despite its close proximity to its large host star.

Analyzes revealed that the unique exoplanet belongs to the so-called Hot NeptuneHowever, it is up to 60 times less dense than the densest planet in this category.

– It is the smallest planet we have ever discovered Red giant And perhaps the least massive planet it orbits [czerwonego] The most gigantic we’ve ever seen. That’s why it seems really strange. “We don’t know why it still has an atmosphere, while other ‘hot Neptunes’, which are much smaller and denser, appear to have lost their atmosphere in much less extreme environments,” Gronblatt said.

Researchers have noted that atmospheric stripping progresses very slowly here. The increasing size of the red giants affects the orbits of the planets, which over time may collide with the surface of the star in a spiral manner. The phoenix will fall into the red giant’s trap in about 100 million years.

It is possible that the star has already absorbed other planets that existed before TIC365102760 b. This unique case may explain to us what fate may befall Earth after about 5 billion years. Then the sun expands You will consume Mercury and VenusAnd maybe our world too.

– We don’t understand well Late evolution of planetary systems. This tells us that perhaps the Earth’s atmosphere will not develop quite as well as we thought, Gronblatt concluded.

The results of the research were published in a scientific journal Astrophysical Journal.