Drastically Shrinking Planets Offer Hints Behind Mystery of Missing Worlds: What Causes This Phenomenon?

A breakthrough has recently reported about the case of shrinking planets. While missions involving planet-hunting have found thousands of worlds that orbit distant stars, there is a severe shortage of exoplanets measuring between 1.5 and two times the radius of Earth.

A SciTechDaily report specified, that's the middle ground between "rocky super-Earths and larger, gas shrouded planets" also known as mini-Neptunes.

Since the discovery of this radius gap in 2017, scientists have been investigating the reason there are quite a few midsize evenly bodies.

This new hint arose from a new way of looking at the data. A research team lead by Trever David of the Flatiron Institute investigated if the radius gas is changing as planets are aging. To get results, they divided exoplanets into two groups comprising the young and old, and they reexamined the gap.

Findings show that the least common planet radii from the younger group were averagely smaller compared to the least common ones from the older set.

Whereas the scarcest size for younger planets was approximately 1.6 times the radius of Earth, it is roughly 1.8 times the radius of this planet at older ages.

ALSO READ: Kepler Space Telescope Reveals About 300 Million Habitable Planets Possibly Exist in the Milky Way

Drastically-Shrinking Mini-Neptunes

The researchers proposed that mini-Neptunes are drastically shrinking over billions of years that leaked away in their atmosphere, leaving just a solid core.

The mini-Neptunes are jumping the planet radius gap and turn out to be super-Earths by losing their gas. Over time, according to Astronomy, the radius gas changes as larger and larger mini-Neptunes are making the jump, transforming into bigger and bigger super-Earths.

Meaning, the gap is the crater between the biggest-size super-Earths, and the tiniest-size mini-Neptunes can still keep their atmospheres.

The researchers reported findings of their study, Evolution of the Exoplanet Size Distribution: Forming Large Super-Earths Over Billions of Years, in The Astronomical Journal.

Commenting on the results, David, a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City said, the all-encompassing point is that, "planets are static spheres of rocks and gas" they are at times tended to be thought of as.

In the atmosphere loss's previously proposed models, some of the said planets were 10 times bigger at the beginning of their lives.

Mysteries Behind the Shrinking Planets

The results lend credence to two suspects previously proposed in the case. One is the leftover heat from the formation of planets and the other, the strong radiation from the host stars.

Both phenomena, according to experts, added energy into the atmosphere of the planet, leading the gas to leak into space.

Perhaps, explained David, both effects are important although there is a need for more sophisticated models to test how much each of such effects is contributing and when in the life cycle of a planet.

Data Collection by Kepler

This new research used data that the Kepler spacecraft as described in the NASA site, collected. Kepler measured the light from distant stars. More so, when an exoplanet is moving between a star and Earth, the observed light is dimming from the star.

By assessing how fast the planet orbits its star, the latter's size, as well as the degree of dimming, astronomers can approximate the size of the exoplanet. Such analyses eventually resulted in the discovery of the radius gap.

One more hypothesis for the mystery behind the shrinking planets was that collisions with space rocks could blast away the thick atmosphere of a planet, averting their smaller planets from collecting lots of gas. This effect mechanism would take approximately 10 million to 100 million years.

Related information is shown on Anton Petrov's YouTube video below: