(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers has discovered a previously unknown exoplanet classified as a hot Jupiter. Its peculiarity is that this planet turned out to be “bloated”.
Another hot Jupiter was discovered by the transit method. The newly discovered alien world was named NGTS-21b.
Hot Jupiters are called exoplanets that are similar in characteristics to Jupiter, but at the same time have a very short period of revolution around their star – less than 10 days.
Due to their proximity to their luminaries, such objects have extremely high surface temperatures. In this case, the new planet turned out to be about a third larger and more than twice as massive as Jupiter.
“The NGTS-21 object was observed during the 2018 campaign from March 24 to November 7, when 9157 images were obtained over 150 nights with an exposure of 10 seconds per frame…,” the researchers write.
“A strong signal was detected after 1.5 days. A verification process has begun to either confirm the signal as likely coming from a hot Jupiter, or disprove its detection.”
Four years after the signal was first seen, the existence of this planet was confirmed. Astronomers specify that the radius of NGTS-21b is 1.33 Jupiter radii, and its mass is 2.36 masses of the largest planet in the solar system.
The newly discovered world revolves around its host star approximately every 37 hours. It is located at a distance of about 3.5 million kilometers from the star. This means that the equilibrium temperature on the surface of NGTS-21b is approximately 1083 degrees Celsius.
The authors of the discovery pay special attention to the fact that NGTS-21b, judging by its parameters, is the so-called bloated and massive hot Jupiter.
Scientists explain that some giant planets increase in size when their parent stars are at the end of their lives. The age of NGTS-21 is estimated at about 10 billion years, which means that its host star is close to its “death”.
And the planet itself is more than twice as old as Earth. It should be noted that “inflated” planets have been known to astronomers for almost two decades, but it is still unknown what exactly causes the inflation processes.
“Non-inflationary planetary structure models suggest that this planet’s atmosphere is inflated by about 21 percent, while inflationary models predict a radius consistent with observations, thus pointing to stellar radiation as the likely origin of NGTS-21b’s increase in radius,” the authors write. discoveries explain the “bloatness” of the newly discovered world.
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