Astronomers found a scorching hot exoplanet orbiting its parent star in just 16 hours. The "ultrahot Jupiter" planet has a "dayside" surface temperature of roughly 6000ºF at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from its star. It indicates that the planet is as hot as a few minor stars.
The exoplanet, 855 million light-years away from Earth, belongs to a class of worlds known as "hot Jupiters." These are massive gaseous balls similar in size to the solar system's own gas giant. It usually rotates around its parent stars and usually completes an orbit in less than ten days. Much faster than Jupiter's orbit around the sun, which takes 12 Earth years.
Even for a hot Jupiter, though, this exoplanet, called TOI-2109b, is extraordinary. The planet, which has five times the mass of Jupiter, orbits its star every 16 hours. It is the shortest known orbit of any identified hot Jupiter, and because of its closeness, it is also the second hottest exoplanet of this kind ever detected.
However, TOI-2109b's short orbital period may signal tragedy in the future. TOI-2109b is thought to be amid "orbital decay," according to astronomers. It indicates that it is spiraling back to its original star. TOI-2109b, on the other hand, has an exceptionally short orbit, which implies it is spiraling into its star quicker than other hot Jupiters.
In a statement, Ian Wong of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said they may identify how the planet approaches its star in one or two years.
Wong, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT at the time of the discovery of TOI-2109b, is the primary author of a study published in The Astronomical Journal that details the findings. The study is titled "TOI-2109: An Ultrahot Gas Giant on a 16 hr Orbit."
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Find Scorching Hot Exoplanet Through Transit Technique
TOI-2109b was discovered using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), SciTechDaily said. TESS uses the so-called "transit technique" of exoplanet identification to discover exoplanets by the slight dips in light they generate when they pass the face of their parent star.
TESS has been extraordinarily effective in detecting exoplanets so far; as of April this year, the spacecraft had discovered almost 2,200 worlds outside our solar system.
In May 2020, TESS began watching TOI-2109, a star in the Hercules constellation's southern region. The expedition designated the star as a TESS Object of Interest due to an orbiting planet's likelihood.
The TESS team looked at the star's brightness to see any telltale periodic dips in output produced by a transiting planet. Every 16 hours, they detected dips that matched to an exoplanet crossing its face.
The planet is tidally locked, which means it has a scorching hot dayside and a colder nightside that scientists are still trying to figure out.
The team now aims to investigate TOI-2109b using the Hubble Space Telescope or perhaps the James Webb Space Telescope, which will debut in December.
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