2023-07-29 11:25:00
This young planet is particularly fickle.
© NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a particularly fickle planet. He puzzles researchers.
The space telescope Hubble observed a fascinating planet. He circles regarding 32 light years away from the earth the red dwarf AU Microscopes. What is special regarding the planet is that it apparently changes its shape every time it orbits its host star the atmosphere.
These atmospheric fluctuations between the orbits amaze researchers. “We’ve never seen the loss of atmosphere go from undetectable to very detectable in such a short period of time when a planet passes in front of its star,” says Keighley RockcliffeAstronomin am Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, in a official notice. “When I saw that for the first time, I thought: That can’t be right”.
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Fickle atmosphere
Hubble measures a star’s brightness by measuring the hydrogen gas observed being expelled from its atmosphere. After one orbit of said planet, the difference in the concentration of hydrogen in the atmosphere was unexpectedly large.
AU Microscopii is a particularly young star, less than 100 million years old. For comparison: Our sun has existed for 4.6 billion years. In this young system, the fickle planet has an orbital period of just once 8.46 days and is 6 million kilometers from the star.
Due to the planet’s close proximity to the host star, its atmosphere is exposed to intense radiation and heat. According to the researchers, the observations might indicate that these violent stellar winds from AU Microscopii die hydrogen atmosphere affect the planet.
Several explanations
“A possible explanation for the lack of hydrogen during a planetary orbit is that a strong stellar flare, the 7 hours previously observed, the escaping hydrogen so strong photoionized might have that he became transparent to light and thus was no longer detectable“, says the message.
The authors offer another possibility for the strange behavior of the planet. “Another explanation is that the stellar wind itself “Shapes the planetary outflow so that it can be observed at some times and not at other times,” say the researchers regarding the hydrogen fluctuations. Such behavior is even predicted by some models, they say.
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Important for exoplanets
“The escape of the atmosphere,” Rockliffe explained Space.com“is possibly one of the most influential development processes for most Exoplanets.” Essentially, this work might help scientists decipher how exoplanets beyond our solar system are made.
“We want to find out what types of planets can survive in this environment. What will they eventually look like when the star has calmed down? Is there any chance at all that they are habitable or will they just end up being burnt planets? ” says Rockcliffe.
Next, the team hopes to replicate these strange atmospheric changes with Hubble and possibly the James Webb to be able to examine the space telescope even more closely.
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