Who says you can’t lose your atmosphere with a nearby red dwarf And then growing a new one with the help of volcanic activity? T.Its elastic Planet, located 41 light-Over the years the earth appears to be prospering again After a rough encounter with his host star.
Exoplanet GJ1132B is both identical and very different from Earth. Sure, it’s many times wider than our planet, but both worlds Divide the same density and atmospheric pressure, And both came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago. And like our planet, it also started to get hot, With a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, and then slowly cooled.
However, the backstories of these two planets are different.
While the Earth has always been a terrestrial, rocky world, GJ 1132 began his life as a Gasius, A planet like Neptune. But as new research shows, the nearby red dwarf has eliminated the helium-rich atmosphere with its original hydrogen- and powerful radiation, so GJ1132B, being stripped to its rocky core, is technically a terrestrial planet. The new paper will appear in the next issue of the Astronomical Journal, but a Preprint Available at Archive.
The authors of the paper came to this conclusion on the basis of direct observations of exoplanets and theoretical modeling. There was a telescope of choice Hubble Space Telescope, Which allowed the team to discover a “secondary atmosphere” in which molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and aerosol haze appear to be like fog on Earth.
“It’s very exciting because we believe that the atmosphere we see now has been reproduced, so it could be a secondary atmosphere,” said Raisa Estrella, co-author of the study at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a planetary scientist. In Southern California, explained Statement. “We first thought that these highly distorted planets could be very boring because we are confident that they have lost their atmosphere. But we looked with Hubble at the current observations of this planet and said, ‘Oh no, there’s an atmosphere.’
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In terms of explanation, the authors say that the earlier part of the planet’s existing hydrogen was already retained as it was absorbed into the molten magma mantle. According to research, volcanic processes are now causing this stored hydrogen to be released from below, according to research.
“This process works early in life on the planet, when the star is hot,” said JPL scientist Mark Swayne. In a NASA publication, the study’s lead author. “Then the star cools down and the planet just sits there. So you’ve got this method where you can cook the atmosphere for the first 100 million years, and then things settle down. And if you can reproduce the atmosphere, you can keep it. ”
The GJ1132B, which takes just 1.5 days to complete the orbit of its hungry host star, is probably at risk of tidal heat, in which gravitational forces penetrate the planet from within. The exoplanet, despite its short years, is in elliptical orbit, and as a result, the effect is known as “gravity pumping.” When the GJ1132B swings back and forth, it alternates between squashing and stretching actions, producing an engine that drives the tidal forces. And, In turn, preserve the liquid cover.
The surface of this exoplanet is probably not very very thick, maybe only a few hundred According to the authors. The terrain is probably fairly flat, With cracks caused by tidal pumping actions, from which hydrogen is constantly leaking out.
The new study has implications for the study of similar worlds elsewhere in the galaxy.
“The discovery of the atmosphere on this rocky planet increases the likelihood that the numerous powerful irradiated super-Earth planets evaporated by sub-Neptunes could, under favorable circumstances, host a detectable atmosphere,” the authors write of the study.
Now the big question is how often does this happen? This is just one Strange phenomenon? That The answer can be given by the James Webb Web Space Telescope, Which, with its infrared capabilities, should be able to easily find planets like this. In addition, JWST can be used to study GJ1132B and provide new data to confirm this. Results.
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