The planet has a surface temperature of over 1926 degrees Celsius.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Researchers have discovered a planet in the universe that is five times larger than Jupiter and orbits so close to the sun. This becomes the heat that exists during the day on the planet it will destroy various molecules into atoms.
Reported Futurism, the planet dubbed TOI-2109b is one of the metal planets that has ever existed. It is also considered an ultrahot Jupiter, a phrase that describes a gas giant that orbits very close to its star and has a surface temperature of over 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit or 1926 degrees Celsius.
TOI-2109b can reach daytime surface temperatures of up to nearly 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The planet orbits its star Jb in just 16 hours, one of the shortest orbits for a planet ever recorded.
The planet was discovered in May 2020, using the US Space Agency’s (NASA) Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Researchers observed the planet in the past year using observatories on Earth and were finally able to confirm the existence of a very hot Jupiter.
“Everything is consistent with it being a planet, and we realized we had something very interesting and relatively rare,” said Avi Shporer, research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and co-author of the study.
Furthermore, observations reveal that TOI-2109b has a number of extreme anomalies. First, it gets so hot that the molecules on the planet are torn apart, only to recombine when night falls. The planet also rotates toward its star relatively quickly when compared to other hot Jupiters.
The researchers now hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will allow them to study TOI-2109b as it gets closer to its sun. In the paper, the authors say that it will provide them with an extraordinary opportunity to study the planet’s most extreme properties.
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