Jakarta –
Some researchers advise that the planet dubbed “Planet of Hell” is located 40 light-years from Earth, reportedly has a surface temperature of 1,982 degrees Celsius.
No wonder this planet has a sea of molten lava due to its high temperature. The size of this planet is also eight times larger and twice as wide as the Earth. The planet is known as 55 Cancri e, but some refer to it as Planet Janssen.
quoted detikjabar from detikInet confiscate Cnn, Friday (12/16/2022), the interior of this exoplanet could also be filled with diamonds. 55 Cancri and orbits very close to its parent star, Copernicus.
As a result, it can complete one orbit in less than one Earth day. A year on this planet equals only about 17.5 hours on Earth.
Astronomers wonder if this planet has always been so close to its star. A team of researchers has used a new instrument known as EXPRES, or the EXTREME PREcision Spectrometer, to determine the true nature of a planet’s orbit.
These discoveries could help astronomers gain new insights into planet formation and how these celestial bodies develop their orbits.
Evolving orbit
The instrument was developed at Yale University by a team led by astronomer Debra Fischer and installed in the Lowell Telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.
The spectrometer can measure tiny shifts in starlight from Copernicus as it 55 Cancri and moves between our planet and star, such as when the Moon blocks out the Sun during a solar eclipse.
The researchers determined that 55 Cancri and orbits along the equator of the star. But this hellish planet wasn’t the only planet orbiting Copernicus. There are four other planets in different orbits inhabiting this star system.
Astronomers believe the eccentric orbit of 55 Cancri e indicates that the planet initially started out on a cooler, more distant orbit before closing in on Copernicus. Then, the gravitational pull of the star’s equator altered the orbit of 55 Cancri e.
“Astronomers predict that this planet formed further back and then crashed into its current orbit,” said Fischer, the study’s senior author and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Yale.
“That trip could knock a planet out of the star’s equatorial plane, but these results show that the planet is holding on,” he said.
Hot exoplanet
Despite the fact that 55 Cancri e isn’t always as close to its star as possible, astronomers have concluded that the exoplanet is always scorching hot.
“The planet is likely so hot that nothing we know of will be able to survive on the surface,” said lead study author Lily Zhao, a researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York.
As 55 Cancri e got closer to Copernicus, this hellish planet got hotter and hotter. Of note, our Solar System is flat as a pancake, where all planets orbit the Sun in a flat plane because they are all formed from the same disk of gas and dust that once revolved around our Sun.
When astronomers study other planetary systems, they find that many of them have no planets orbiting a single plane, which raises questions about how unique our Solar System is in the universe.
This kind of data can provide more insight into what ordinary planets and Earth-like environments might be like in the universe.
“We hope to find planetary systems similar to our own and to better understand the systems we know about,” Zhao said, adding that the main goal of the EXPRES instrument is to find Earth-like planets.
“EXPRESS accuracy is more than 1,000 times better than we had 25 years ago, when I just started working as a planet hunter,” says Fischer.
“Increasing the accuracy of measurements is one of my main career goals because it will allow us to detect smaller planets when looking for analogies to Earth,” he concluded.
This article was published on detikInet with the title On this hellish planet, a year lasts only 17.5 hours
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