Amira Shehata wrote on Saturday, July 29, 2023 10:00 PM Monitor Hubble telescope An angry star called AU Microscopii is impacting and evaporating one of its own planets, AU Microscopii b, about 32 light-years from our solar system.
According to Space, these findings will reveal which exoplanets are undergoing a form of atmospheric evaporation while also giving us a better understanding of which stars may be causing these atmospheres to be shredded nonstop.
Planet AU Mic b is about four times the diameter of Earth, and has had the misfortune of being obscured about 6 million miles (9.6 million km) from its star, an orb classified as a red dwarf, one of the most extreme stellar objects in the universe. .
Research has shown that even the quietest example of a red dwarf star like this one is still wilder than our scorching sun.
It’s 23 million years old, said Kelly Rockliffe, lead author of a study on the new Hubble discoveries and an exoplanet researcher at Dartmouth College, and stellar astronomers are excited that the AU Mic is an example of what the tantrum-like youthful years of a red dwarf, the most popular type of star, look like. common in the Milky Way.
Also, because Hubble is in Earth orbit, it can determine when a distant planet passes between its stellar host and our own by picking up beams of starlight.
