One of the most extreme discoveries has been made.
The TOI-2109b is a gas giant that is 5 times the mass of Jupiter and is 1.35 times the size. It whirls around once every 16 hours because it is so close to its host star.
It's the closest gas giant we've ever found, so close that it's on a path of doom, with half of it scorched by the star's heat. TOI-2109b is thought to reach a temperature of 3,227 degrees Celsius on its day side. That is hotter than some stars.
It's the second-hottest exoplanet ever discovered, and it's in the category of ultrahot Jupiters. Astronomers hope that it will tell them more about how exoplanets come to exist and how stars interact with them.
Ian Wong of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said that they may be able to detect how the planet moves closer to its star in one or two years. We will not see the planet fall into its star. This planet might not be there for another 10 million years.
There are subcategories of hot and ultrahot Jupiters.
They are gas giants like Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, these exoplanets are very close to their host star, which makes them very hot.
Hot Jupiters are a problem according to current models of planet formation. A gas giant can't form close to its star since the gravity, radiation, and intense stellar winds should keep the gas from clumping together.
We've found hundreds. Astronomers believe that these exoplanets form farther away from their host stars.
"From the beginning of exoplanetary science, hot Jupiters have been seen as outliers," said astronomer and MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research's Avi Shporer. How does a planet of Jupiter's size get to an around-the-world location in a few days? We don't have anything like this in our Solar System, and we see this as an opportunity to study them and explain their existence.
Astronomers hope to catch them at different stages of their lifespans to piece together the evolutionary puzzle of the hot Jupiter. We've found TOI-2109b to be the closest to death by decay.
The diagram shows the changes in a star's light. J. Winn wrote about arXiv.
It was found by NASA's TESS, a space telescope that looks for dips in the light of a star. This is a sign that something is near that star.
The amount by which the light of the stars illuminates a body can be seen. Small shifts in the star's light as it moves around on the spot can tell us its mass.
The distance between TOI 2109b and the sun is just over two million miles. The distance between the Sun and Earth is just 1.6 percent.
The exoplanet is locked to its host star, with one side facing it. The exoplanet's side, studied as the exoplanet rotates in and out of view, reaches an insane temperature of 3,500Kelvin, but the night side, facing away from the star, is a little harder to understand.
Shporer said that the planet's night side brightness is below the sensitivity of the TESS data, which raises questions about what is really happening there.
Is the temperature very cold or does the planet take heat on the day side and transfer it to the night side? We are at the beginning of trying to answer this question.
The rate at which TOI 2109b is moving towards its star was what the research team could measure. It gets closer by 10 to 750 milliseconds a year. That is the fastest inspiral rate of any hot Jupiter we have found.
Future studies of TOI-2109b, possibly with the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, will reveal some of the stresses hot Jupiters undergo as they undertake their spirals of death.
The most extreme subclass of exoplanets include TOI-2109b.
Some of the unique physical and chemical processes that occur in their atmospheres have no parallels in our own solar system.
The research has been published.
