A team of astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) discovered a small lava planet, about 140 light years from the earth, which is quickly disintegrating a huge tail of 9 million kilometers, similar to that of a comet.
As the planet, which scientists called BD+05 4868 AB, revolves around its star (every 30.5 hours) gives off a large number of minerals from its surface that evaporates and creating the tremendous tail, as described by an article collected this Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters magazine.
“The extension of the tail is gigantic, its 9 million kilometers long suppose half of the orbit of the planet,” explains one of the authors, Marc Hon, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research of MIT.
Given the proximity to their star, the researchers estimate that the planet’s temperature is about 1,600 degrees Celsius, and that as the minerals on their surface are so extremely heated, evaporate and escape the space, where they cool, the long dusty tail is cool.
The planet “is disintegrating at a spectacular pace, detaching an amount of material equivalent to the mass of an Everest mountain every time it orbits around its star.” At that rate and given its small mass, which is between Mercury and the Moon, the researchers predict that it could disappear completely in about 1 or 2 million years.
The most massive terrestrial planets, such as Earth, have a greater gravitational attraction and, therefore, can maintain their atmospheres. In the case of BD+05 4868 AB, researchers suspect that there is very little gravitational attraction.
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Of the almost 6,000 planets that astronomers have discovered to date, only three other planets were previously known in disintegration beyond our solar system.
The three were detected more than 10 years ago using NASA Kepler Space Telescope and presented queues similar to those of comets. The new finding, BD+05 4868 AB, has the longest tail of the four planets in disintegration known to date.
“That implies that its evaporation is the fastest and that it will disappear much faster than the other planets,” adds Hon. The explanation is that the star that houses the planet is relatively close and, therefore, is brighter than those that house their other three homologists.
Researchers will try to determine the mineral composition of the dust tail identifying which infrared light colors absorb through one of the instruments of the James Webb space telescope.
This is how astronomers discovered the new planet
Astronomers detected the planet thanks to NASA’s Tess satellite, a mission directed by MIT researchers that monitors the stars closest to Earth in search of periodic transits or falls of stellar light that could be indications of exoplanets in orbit.
The signal that astronomers put on notice was a peculiar transit, with a fall that fluctuated in depth in each orbit. The scientists confirmed that the signal corresponded to a rocky planet in closed orbit that dragged a long debris tail similar to that of a kite.
The new planet was detected almost by chance: “We were doing the typical planet investigation, and by chance I detected this sign that seemed very unusual,” said Hon in a MIT statement.
The typical signal of an explanet in orbit resembles a brief depression in a light curve that is repeated regularly. This typical pattern was different from that Hon and his colleagues detected in the host star BD+05 4868 A, located in the Pegasus constellation.
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