admin
Astronomers based at the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy working with a team of other astronomers have discovered three planets that are orbiting fatally close to their destruction… around stars that are at their end-of-life. Scientists believe that these planets will be inevitably consumed by their stars. One of them in particular named TOI-2337b will reportedly be swallowed up by its solar parent in less than a million years, making it by far the soonest of any planets currently known to man.
The three stars were discovered with the NASA TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), they have some of the shortest orbital periods around either sub-giant or giant stars, tens of thousands of times larger than our sun.
“These discoveries are crucial to understanding a new frontier in exoplanet studies: how planetary systems evolve over time,” explained lead author Samuel Grunblatt, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Grunblatt, who earned his PhD from the Institue for Astronomy, added that “these observations offer new windows into planets nearing the end of their lives, before their host stars swallow them up.” according to SciTech Daily.
Grunblatt and his fellow astronomers after identifying the exoplanets based on data from TESS confirmed them using the powerful Keck Observatory at Maunakea in Hawai’i.
A pretty interesting question could be answered by studying these exoplanets in detail: as stars die, are their planets just consumed by the expanding star? Or do the planets spiral in as gravity increases?
Are The Planets Consumed Or Do They Plunge To Destruction?
The University Of Hawaii At Manoa explained,
“Current models of planet dynamics suggest that planets should spiral in toward their host stars as the stars evolve over time, particularly in the last 10% of the star’s lifetime. This process also heats the planets, potentially causing their atmospheres to inflate. However, this stellar evolution will also cause the planets around a star to come closer to each other, increasing the likelihood that some of them will collide, or even destabilize the entire planetary system.”
So will the star expand and engulf the planets or will the planets spiral into their stars before the end? The answer would seem to be both.
