- The remains of a gas giant were seen orbiting a nearby star, astronomers reveal.
- The planet’s core is all that remains, but researchers think it was once a massive gaseous planet.
- What lies deep within the giant gas planets has long been a mystery to astronomers.
Giant gas planets like Jupiter are incredibly interesting objects. They are also quite mysterious, as no one really knows what is lurking in the miles of gas that make up their thick atmospheres. For example, it is believed that there is some kind of rocky core inside Jupiter, but beyond that, researchers cannot say what features it has, how large it is, or even begin to guess what it looks like.
Our best chance to see the nucleus of a gas giant may be to detect the nucleus of a planet that has already been burned by a nearby star. That’s exactly what researchers at the University of Warwick have done, and the planet, called TOI 849 b, is a burned-out shell of what might have been a powerful hot Jupiter.
Jupiter’s hot planets are gas giants that orbit particularly close to their host stars. They have been seen by exoplanet survey projects, but no one really knows what the future holds. Do they move outward at more comfortable distances, as some scientists believe was the case with Jupiter, or do they stay close to their star and burn slowly, which is what seems to have happened to TOI 849b?
In their article published in the journal Nature, the researchers explain how the planet’s rocky core, which is roughly the size of Neptune, may have once been a gas giant. One of the other possibilities, scientists suggest, is that the planet is a failed gas giant that failed to gather enough gas to form the characteristic huge balloon that hot Jupiters are known for.
The last possibility the researchers suggest is that the nucleus is what’s left of a giant gas planet that collided with another huge object. Such an impact would have greatly disrupted the planet and potentially sent its gas wealth elsewhere.
“The planet could have been a gas giant before it suffered extreme mass loss due to thermal self-interruption or collisions with giant planets, or it could have prevented substantial gas build-up, perhaps through gap opening or late formation.” , the researchers write. “Although photoevaporation rates cannot explain the loss of mass required to reduce a Jupiter-like gas giant, they can remove a small (some landmass) of hydrogen and helium envelope at timescales of several billion years, implying that any remaining atmosphere in TOI- 849b is likely to be enriched with water or other volatiles from the planet’s interior. We concluded that TOI-849b is the remnant core of a giant planet. “
It is quite exciting, but there is a downside. The planet, or what’s left of it, is 730 light-years from Earth. That’s not a great distance, cosmically speaking, but it’s far enough away that researchers can’t really see it well. They can estimate its size and mass, but that’s it.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering the latest news and trends in virtual reality, handheld devices, smartphones, and future technology. Most recently, Mike served as technical editor at The Daily Dot, and has appeared on USA Today, Time.com, and countless other websites and in print. His love of reporting is second only to his addiction to games.
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