2023-08-22 06:00:19
A star system located 1400 light-years away from us has unveiled one of its wonders: a “hot Jupiter” with intriguing behavior that might help us better understand exoplanets.
Illustration of a white dwarf star (A white dwarf is a gaseous celestial object resulting from the evolution of a star from…) next to a planet (A planet is a celestial body orbiting around the Sun or another star of…) of type “Hot Jupiter (Hot Jupiters or Pegasids are a class of exoplanets with a mass of the same order of…)” (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
This system is composed of a “white dwarf” and a “brown dwarf”. White dwarfs are crystalline cores of exhausted giant stars, while brown dwarfs are located at the border (A border is an imaginary line separating two territories, in particular two…) between planets and stars. The latter, more massive than the gaseous giants, do not however have enough fuel (A fuel is a fuel that powers a heat engine. This transforms…) to trigger a fusion reaction (In physics and metallurgy , the fusion is the passage of a body from the solid state to the stellar state…) nickname of “failed stars”. The brown dwarf in question is similar in size to Jupiter, but has regarding 80 times its mass. It is incredibly dense and warm. While one face is permanently turned towards its companion star, the other is opposed to it. The “day” side reaches temperatures exceeding 9,500°C, or 3,900°C more than our Sun. In comparison, its “night” side is much softer, at 2,700°C.
This new world is hotter than all previously discovered exoplanets. Its luminosity (Luminosity designates the characteristic of what emits or reflects…), combined with the faint glow of its companion star, makes it an excellent representation of a category of exoplanets known as “hot Jupiters”. . These gas giants orbit very close to their star, with temperatures between 700 and 1,700°C. But their proximity to their star makes them difficult to observe.
Fortunately, this brown dwarf orbiting a very faint star was much easier to detect. His study might tell us more regarding the formation of binary systems and the evolution of hot Jupiters.
Na’ama Hallakoun, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and lead author of the study, underlines the importance of these observations (Observation is the action of attentively following phenomena, without the intention of… .) for our understanding of exoplanets in the universe (The Universe is the set of everything that exists and the laws that govern it.).
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