Suara.com – Astronomers find exoplanet the giant called hottest exoplanet second ever known. This planet only takes 16 hours to circle its parent star.
Named TOI-2109b, the planet belongs to a category known as hot Jupiter. Planets in this category have more or less the same arrangement as Jupiter, but orbit much closer to their parent star.
Although experts have identified more than 400 hot Jupiters to date, the team of scientists says there is no planet like TOI-2109b.
“Everything is consistently a planet and we realized we had something very interesting and relatively rare,” said Avi Shporer, an exoplanet scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). .
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Shporer and a team of experts made the discovery in data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which has been orbiting Earth since April 2018.
TESS can find planets orbiting their stars very quickly, because the telescope observes a swath of the sky for about a month before moving.
The satellite does not view the planet directly, instead TESS observes a small, rhythmic drop in brightness that marks a planet.
In the case of TOI-2109b, the drop occurs every 16 hours, faster than expected found by scientists to date.
The star TOI-2109b is located about 855 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules, known as TOI-2109.
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The observations also revealed key characteristics about TOI-2109b. This planet is about 2.4 million km from its star. In comparison, Mercury is about 24 times farther from the Sun.
TOI-2109b is about five times as massive and a third as massive as Jupiter, while its star is twice the mass and size of the Sun.
The new planet is also the second-hottest exoplanet known, with daytime temperatures reaching 3,300 degrees Celsius.
To experts, the most interesting characteristic of TOI-2109b is probably its orbital change. According to the research team, the planet is slowly approaching its star at the fastest speed astronomers have ever seen, between 10 and 750 milliseconds per year.
TESS will conduct re-observations in May and June 2022 on TOI-2109. Experts hope the observations will allow the team to study the orbital approach phenomenon in more detail.
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