Jakarta –
Extrasurya planet 55 Cancers and has several names. But this rocky planet located 40 light-years from Earth is best known for its reputation as the “Planet of Hell.”
55 Cancri e is also called super-Earth because it is a rocky planet that is eight times as massive and twice as wide as Earth. But the planet is so hot that it has oceans of molten lava. Imagine, the surface temperature alone reaches 1,982 degrees Celsius.
Interestingly, the interior of this exoplanet may 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.
Quoted from Cnn, astronomers wonder if the planet has always been this close to its star. A team of researchers has used a new instrument known as EXPRES, or the EXTREME PREcision Spectrometer, to determine the exact nature of planetary orbits.
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 alters the orbit of 55 Cancri e.
“Astronomers predict that this planet formed much 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.
“Those trips may knock planets out of the star’s equatorial plane, but these results show that the planet is holding on tightly,” 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 gets closer to Copernicus, this hellish planet gets 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 have studied other planetary systems, they have found that many of them do not have planets orbiting a single plane, which raises the question of 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,” said Fischer.
“Improving the accuracy of measurements is a key goal of my career as it will allow us to detect smaller planets when searching for Earth analogues,” he concluded.
Watch a video “Cause of Planet Venus Hot as Hell“
[Gambas:Video 20detik]
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