SPACE — If not for a miracle, no one can say for sure how the zombie planet Halla could have escaped horrific destruction. This Jupiter-sized exoplanet should not exist after its parent star, Baekdu, underwent a sudden and violent death process.
Gas giant 8 Ursae Minoris b aka Halla is a ‘Hot Jupiter’ planet located 520 light years from Earth. The enormous world seemed to face destruction only after the Baekdu star swelled to thousands of times its original size.
The swelling allows Baekdu to devour any planet in its orbit.
However, mysteriously and miraculously, Halla survived. Astronomers have published their findings in the journal Nature on June 28, 2023.
“The death of a star usually spells disaster for the orbiting planets. “When we realized that Halla managed to survive around such a giant star, it was a complete surprise,” said Daniel Huber, astronomer and researcher at Australia’s Sydney Institute of Astronomy.
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Stars will die when the basic fuel for nuclear fusion runs out. When Baekdu exhausted its supply of hydrogen fuel, the star expanded enormously, up to 1.5 times Halla’s orbital distance. This means that the star’s swollen body has touched Halla.
Researchers say Halla should have burned and been completely swallowed before the dying Baekdu shrunk back to its current size, a red giant. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Halla was first discovered by Korean astronomers in 2015, using the radial velocity method. Since its discovery, Halla has been a divine mystery; orbiting the star Baekdu which has turned into a red giant.
For most of its life, stars burn by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. But once their hydrogen fuel ran out, they started fusing helium, which led to a huge increase in energy output.
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This causes them to swell to hundreds, even thousands of times their original size. As stars expand, they devour all their inner planets, then turn into massive stars called red giants.
To ensure Halla is one of Baekdu’s native planets and not a cosmic interloper, researchers observed it using the Keck Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in 2021 and 2022. It was confirmed that Halla’s orbit was nearly circular for 93 days, and it was stable.
However, astronomers are still confused, because it is almost impossible for Halla to survive if it is ever touched by its star. Moreover, the distance between Halla and Baekdu is currently only half the distance between Earth and the Sun.
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2023-10-01 09:45:00
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