Hot Jupiter! It sounds like an epithet, but "hot Jupiter" is a term used by astronomers to describe a planet that is a gas giant like Jupiter and revolves close to its star, like Mercury. The more extreme of these are called "ultrahot Jupiters." NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found a really strange ultrahot Jupiter. The new exoplanet designated TOI-2109b is 855 light years away, and makes both Jupiter and Mercury look like wimps. TOI-2109b is only 1.5 million miles from its sun, and revolves around it every 16 days- the shortest revolution of any gas giant we've observed so far.
The star is half again as massive as our sun, and TOI-2109b is five times the size of Jupiter. You might try to imagine how hot the surface is. Scientists think the side of the planet that always faces the star would be about 3500 degrees Kelvin, or 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. The side that faces away from the star ...well, they don't know what's happening there, as it's pretty hard to see what's going on that far away.
Knowing how close these massive celestial bodies are and how gravity works here in our solar system, you'd think that TOI-2109b would be on a collision course with its star (or at least it was 855 years ago). From the observations made so far, the planet is spiraling toward its star, but it will not collide for many years. Astronomers hope to learn a lot more about this planet when the James Webb space telescope begins to send back data. Read more about the ultrahot Jupiter TOI-2109b at SciTechDaily. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon)
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