Everything in the cosmos, even the universe itself, has a life cycle: it is born, develops and dies. But it is one thing to know it and quite another to witness it. Now, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) exoplanet survey satellite has discovered the fastest disintegrating planet ever seen. the planet is disintegrating so quickly due to bombardment from its star, that it is losing “a moon” of matter every million years. Soon, it is doomed to disappear completely.
The discovery has been possible thanks to the joint work of a team of astronomers from MIT and another from the University of Pennsylvania. The exoplanet is called BD+05 4868 Ab and orbits a star designated BD+05 4868 A. That star is about 141 light years away.which also makes this particular exoplanet the closest disintegrating world ever seen. The two teams intend to team up and train the powerful infrared eye of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on BD+05 4868 Ab to learn more about this disappearing world.
“These planets are literally spilling their guts into space for us, and with JWST, they’re finally We have the means to study their composition and see what planets orbiting other stars are really made of.”explains Nick Tusay, leader of the study, in a statement.
“It is notable that directly measuring the interior of the planets in the solar system is so difficult (we only have a limited sample of the Earth’s mantle and do not have access to that of Mercury, Venus or Mars), but here We have found planets hundreds of light years away that are sending their interiors into space and backilluminating them for us to study with our spectrographs. – adds Jason Wright, co-author of the study -. “It is a remarkable and fortuitous opportunity to understand the interiors of terrestrial planets.”
The disintegrating planet has the most prominent dust tails to date, the study claims. The dust tails emanating from the rapidly evaporating planet are gigantic. Its length of approximately 9 million kilometers It circles more than half of the planet’s orbit around the star every 30 and a half hours. In fact, its tail is so important in density and size that when it crosses the face of its star, it blocks 1% of its light and affects the traffic signal for 15 hours.
“The speed at which the planet is evaporating is absolutely cataclysmic and We are incredibly lucky to be witnessing the last hours of this dying planet. – says Marc Hon, co-author of the study -. It What’s also very exciting about BD+05 4868 Ab is that it has the brightest host star of the other decaying planets, dozens of times brighter than the sun, establishing it as a benchmark for future decay studies. such systems.”