A hot super-Earth tens of light-years away from our Solar System kept scientists awake for almost 20 years. It darkened and brightened again for seemingly no reason. Now they have finally solved the mystery.
For nearly two decades, scientists have been puzzled by the strange signals emitted by the named planet 55 Cancri e, which is located about 40 light years from Earth. The planet was emitting variable doses of infrared and visible radiation, and it was these changes, according to the website Live science astronomers have not yet been able to satisfactorily explain.
Planet 55 Cancri e belongs to the so-called super-Earths, i.e. rocky planets up to ten times larger than ours. It is even the first such planet that scientists discovered in 2004. Furthermore, it has very little in common with Earth. Indeed, there are truly hellish conditions there.
It’s about 2,400 degrees Celsius during the day, and a “fresh” 1,100 degrees Celsius at night. “The surface of this planet is probably covered with graphite and diamond rather than water and granite,” he then added to the magazine Unilad astrophysicist and exoplanet expert Nikku Madhusudhan from the University of Cambridge. It is diamond that makes up to a third of the weight of the entire planet.
The reason for these extreme conditions is the very small distance between the planet and its star. It is only two percent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is why one revolution of the parent star takes this planet only 17 Earth hours.
And it is precisely the extreme proximity of the star to the planet that the team led by Kevin Heng from the University of Munich in the recently published studied explains the strange changes in radiation. The key to understanding them is the wondrous atmosphere of a hot super-Earth.
Most recently, scientists assume that volcanoes on the planet repeatedly wake up and calm down, which release volcanic gases into its surroundings and thus create a dense atmosphere around it. Here, however, the extreme radiation and strong streams of particles ejected by the star “blow” away.
However, the strength of these processes is not in harmony with each other, and so there are situations when the planet is almost “naked” or, on the contrary, covered by clouds. Such changes then, according to the current ideas of scientists, cause the so far mysterious lighting up and re-extinguishing of the planet.
Perhaps its authors will not have to wait long to confirm whether this hypothesis is true. Thanks to James Webb’s new telescope, it should be possible to measure the conditions in the planet’s atmosphere and thus solve this mystery once and for all.
This spring, scientists found an exoplanet that, on the other hand, could be suitable for life:
TN.cz
2023-10-20 11:23:00
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