The super hot football planet spits metals in space

It has the shape of an American football and spits iron in space: a planet far from our solar system is extremely unusual, as researchers have discovered.

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Astronomers have observed an extremely hot planet in the shape of a football, throwing metals into space. The exoplanet bearing the catalog number WASP-121b revolves around a star in the constellation Puppis in the southern sky. With the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers around David Sing of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have been able to detect clouds of magnesium and iron gas around the planet, as they report now in the journal Astronomical Journal.

Discovered in 2015, the planet is about 900 light-years from Earth and about one-third more mbad than Jupiter, the largest planet in our system. The exoplanet rotates so closely around its original star that its gravity almost tears it. The planet is lengthened, so that its shape reminds that of an American football.

Warmer than other known exoplanets

In addition, the nearby star warms the upper atmosphere to over 2500 degrees Celsius. This is not only much hotter than on other known exoplanets, but also hot enough so that metals such as iron and magnesium do not condense in the deepest layers of the atmosphere, but can escape into space as a gas.

The planet belongs by its mbad and its temperature to the clbad of hot Jupiter. Such metals have also been observed in other hot Jupiter, but only in the lower atmosphere, explained Sing in a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

"You do not know if they escape or not," he says. "At WASP-121b, magnesium and iron gas are so far away from the planet that they are not bound by gravity." According to the researchers, this is the first evidence that an exoplanet throws such metals into space. (KAD / dpa)