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NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) discovered a large planet that was somehow orbiting a star that was supposed to destroy the planet.
Planet 8 Ursae Minoris b, according to NASA observations, orbits a star approximately 530 light years away and is in its death stages.
Like a swelling red giant star, the star is thought to have expanded beyond its planet’s orbit before shrinking to its current still-giant size. In other words, the star will swallow and tear up the planets orbiting around it.
However, there is one planet that remains in orbit in a stable and almost circular condition.
NASA relied on actual measurements using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) when discovering planet 8 Ursae Minoris b.
Finally, NASA concluded that this strange discovery was the fact that the process of planet formation and destruction was much more complicated and unpredictable as many people had thought.
According to NASA, stars like the Sun, as they approach the end of their lifetime, begin to use up their nuclear fuel content. Then, they become red giants, growing, to their maximum size. If this happens, the star will expand from its center to 0.7 astronomical units, which is about three-quarters of the distance from Earth to the Sun. Next, they will swallow and destroy planets orbiting nearby as a final process towards extinction.
Surprisingly, Planet 8 Ursae Minoris b, a large gas world, measuring about 0.5 astronomical units, or AU, did not disintegrate, instead orbiting its surrounding star. It should be impossible for this planet to survive the engulfment event.
The study’s lead author, Marc Hon, proposed two other possibilities, planet 8 Ursae Minoris b actually survived the merger of two stars or is a new planet formed from debris left behind by the merger.
Horn explained that the first scenario starts with two stars the size of the Sun orbiting close to each other and a planet orbiting both. One of the stars evolved slightly faster than the others, passing through the red giant phase, shedding its outer layers, and turning into a white dwarf, a small but high-mass stellar remnant.
Then, the other star had just reached the red giant stage before the two collided. As a result, the only remaining planets are the red giants we see today. However, this merger stopped the red giant from expanding any further, preventing the planet orbiting it from being destroyed.
In the second scenario, a violent merger of two stars would eject a lot of dust and gas that forms a disk around the remaining red giant. “Protoplanetary” disks provide the raw materials to form new planets. This process is a kind of final second life stage in a planetary system, even though the star is still nearing its end.
How can astronomers deduce this chaotic series of events from present-day observations? It all comes down to well-understood stellar physics.
Planet-hunting TESS is useful for observing jitters and quakes in distant stars. This process follows a known pattern during the red giant phase (Tracking such oscillations in stars is known as “asteroseismology.”)
The oscillation pattern on 8 Ursae Minoris, the discovery team found, matches the oscillation pattern of a red giant in the final stages of helium burning. That is, not the oscillation pattern that is still developing as it is today, burning hydrogen. So, it doesn’t mean that the star is still growing and hasn’t reached the planet. The crisis has come and gone, but planet 8 Ursae Minoris remains, somehow.
The research team with Marc Hon from the University of Hawaii as the leader outlined their findings in a paper entitled A Close-in Giant Planet Escapes Engulfment by Its Star in June 2023 in the journal Nature.
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2023-10-03 03:00:59
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