The Hottest Planet Ever Found Bubbles Its Own Atmosphere

The hottest planet ever discovered by astronomers has temperatures so high that it bubbles out of its own atmosphere and transmits it to its host star.

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany The overheated planet travels into orbit around a star whose temperatures are almost twice as high as those of the sun, its puffy atmosphere made of gaseous hydrogen quickly evaporates

Exoplanet Years

In an article published in Nature Astronomy researchers Fei Yan and Thomas Henning say that l & # 39; KELT-9b exoplanet atmosphere is heated to the extreme by its host star KELT-9.

In 2017, a team of astronomers from Ohio State University led by B. Scott Gaudi discovered the exoplanet KELT-9b using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope at the Observatory Winner near Sonoita, Arizona.

The goal of KELT is to find a new exoplan ets using the transit method. This is done by finding temporary hollows in the brightness of a star, suggesting that an object has just moved into orbit before it.

Kelt-9b was found thanks to this method towards the direction of the Cygnus constellation at 650 years of the Earth, which is not far, according to astronomical standards.

KELT-9B is a Superhot Jupiter

The planet, which is three times heavier than Jupiter and almost twice as large, is very short orbiting its host star, which reaches temperatures of 17,500 degrees Fahrenheit . That's almost twice the temperature of the sun, which is around 9,900 degrees Fahrenheit.

The planet itself is near its host star, which is three times larger than the sun. A trip around the star takes only 1.5 days of Earth to complete. It's about 10 times smaller than the Mercury orbit or only 3% of the diameter of the Earth's orbit.

The proximity of the planet KELT-9b with its star means that it is well closed. The same side is always the edge of the day. On this side of the planet, temperatures can reach up to 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit. According to experts, it's hotter than most stars.

"This planet reminds me of the mythical Icarus, who came close to the Sun and crashed," says Thomas Henning, co-author and director of MPIA. "Our planet is not going to crush, but it will certainly lose an essential part of its atmosphere."

A case of interplanetary flight

Using the CARMENES spectrograph of the 3.5-meter telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, the researchers discovered that KELT-9 not only blocks the Exoplanet's atmosphere, but also uses its strong gravitational force to attract the planet's hydrogen toward it.

The atmosphere is surprisingly large. In fact, it has reached up to more than half the radius of the planet itself. Computer models simulating how the overheated star of the planet's hydrogen shows that the atmosphere is close to its maximum size.

At this rate, researchers say that the planet is losing more than 100,000 tons of hydrogen per second. If the leak of hydrogen continues, experts believe that the planet will lose all of its atmosphere and will be stripped of its bare and rocky core.

In two centuries of Earth, KELT-9 has so devoured the atmosphere of the planet. that it will reach a point where it will touch the surface of the planet. Overall, the outlook is not good for the hottest exoplanet ever known to man.