#exoplanet

#exoplanet

Exoplanet Revolves Around Its Star Every 16 HoursHot 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)#exoplanet #hotJupiter #ultrahotJupiter

Astronomers Found a Moon-Forming Disc Around an Exoplanet 400 Light-Year AwayYou've probably seen images of circumplanetary disc - or ring of matter that orbit a planet - on the cover of imaginative sci-fi novels before, but astronomers have finally captured the first image of such actual disc around a planet outside of our solar system.Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomer Myriam Benisty and colleagues observed a disc surrounding the exoplanet PDS 70c, a giant Jupiter-like planet orbiting a star 400 light-years away."Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time," Benisty said in a statement by the European Southern Observatory.Astronomers noted that the disc surrounding PDS 70c is huge: it's about 500 times larger than Saturn's rings.Circumplanetary discs are thought to play a significant role in the formation of moons and satellites, as its gas and dust come together into progressively larger bodies through multiple collisions, ultimately becoming moons.Images:ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.#circumplanetarydisc #ALMA #astronomy #astrophysics #EuropeanSouthernObservatory #PDS70c #planet #exoplanet #moonformingdisc