An exoplanet called ‘Hot Jupiter” was discovered 725 light-years from Earth. It has a 3.2 day orbit and is unusually fast.
A team from the Indian Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad spent three months measuring the orbit of the ‘Hot Jupiter’ gas giant.
According to Professor Abhijit Chakraborty, the exoplanet TOI-1789b was ‘orbiting far too close’ to an aged star, which is why it has been named as such.
The team discovered the world, which is 1.4 times larger than Jupiter but with 70 per cent of its mass, using the PRL Advanced Radial-Velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS) optical spectrograph on the telescope at Mt Abu Observatory.
The ‘puffy’ nature of the star, caused by the staggering 3,140°F temperatures and the orbit around a star close to the end of its life, made it an important one to study, the astronomers behind the discovery explained.
Indian scientists have discovered an exoplanet called “Hot Jupiter”, which orbits a star 725 light-years from Earth. This orbit has a remarkable speed, at 3.2 days.
PARAS, India’s first fibre optic telescope, measures light wavelengths and is able to determine the mass exoplanets.
The PRL team spent three months studying the hot alien world, from December 2020 to March 2021, in order to understand its size and orbit.
They discovered that it had a mass less than Jupiter, even though it was larger than the gas giant. However, it also proved to be extremely hot.
Because it orbits close to its star (1.5 times greater than the Sun), this is why.
TOI-1789b completes a single orbit of its star TOI-1789 every 3.2 days, which for comparison, is significantly less than the 88 days Mercury takes to orbit the Sun.
The planet is 0.05 AU (Astronomical Units) from the star, where one AU is the distance between the Sun and Earth – or approximately 93 million miles.
AT 0.05AU, it is about one-tenth as far between TOI-1789b (or its star) and Mercury.
Although hot Jupiter worlds were previously discovered, they are extremely rare as the gas giants are often located in outer regions of the star system.
Hot Jupiter is a planet similar to Jupiter in physical properties, such as being a giant gas cloud. However, it orbits very closely to Jupiter’s star with an orbit of less than 10 days.
This planet is extremely hot, with a surface temperature of about 2000 Kelvin (3,140°F), due to its close proximity to the star.
According to Astronomers, it is the extreme temperature at its surface that caused it to “bloat”, resulting in a larger radius than expected given its mass.
According to the scientists behind the discovery, this star was characterized by its ‘puffy” nature due to 3,140°F and an orbit about a star that is nearing the end.
It has a radius of 1.4 times Jupiter’s, which is roughly 60,816 mile. This would make it more massive than Jupiter. However, its mass is 70% less than that of the gas giant.
With a density 0.31 grams/cm3, it is among the most dense planets. In comparison, Jupiter has a density of 1.33 g/cm³.
In their paper, the authors said that it was one of the few near-evolved stars with a nearby planet.
“The discovery of these systems will help us understand how inflation occurs in hot Jupiters, and it will also allow us to study the evolution of planets surrounding stars that are not part of the main sequence.
The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Hubble, a large space satellite used by scientists for studying the atmosphere of exoplanets distant from Earth allows them to do so using huge space satellites.
Conditions that are unique to distant stars and orbiting planets can often be unlike any we have seen in the atmosphere.
Scientists need to know the composition of their atmospheres in order to understand and comprehend these new worlds.
They use a telescope like Nasa’s Hubble Telescope to do it.
These satellites are huge and scan the skies to find exoplanets of potential interest.
The sensors perform various forms of analysis.
The most valuable and effective is absorption spectroscopy.
This type of analysis determines the intensity of light entering a planet’s atmosphere.
A gas can absorb a slight variation in the wavelength of light. This is what causes a blackline to appear on the complete spectrum.
These lines are a sign of a particular molecule that is present on our planet.
They are often called Fraunhofer lines after the German astronomer and physicist that first discovered them in 1814.
Scientists can combine all wavelengths of light to determine the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere.
What is missing is the key to finding out what’s there.
This is crucial because the Earth’s atmosphere could interfere with it.
It is possible for light to be absorption by chemicals to skew samples.
This can be used to find helium and sodium in alien atmospheres.
This diagram shows how light passing from a star and through the atmosphere of an exoplanet produces Fraunhofer lines indicating the presence of key compounds such as sodium or helium