(ORDO NEWS) — Using NASA‘s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has discovered a new super-hot exoplanet of the gas giant class with an extremely short orbital period. Called TOI-2109b, this newly discovered planet is about five times as massive as Jupiter and has the lowest orbital period of any gas giant known to science today.
The TESS satellite is surveying about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun in search of transiting exoplanets. A team led by Ian Wong of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, recently reported a new transit signal that has been identified in the light curve of a mid-late type F star known as TOI-2109. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by additional observations.
This planet, designated TOI-2109b, has a radius of about 1.34 that of Jupiter, while its mass is estimated at about 5.02 that of Jupiter. The planet revolves around the parent star with a period of about 16 hours and 8 minutes, being at a distance of about 0.018 astronomical units (1 AU is equal to the average distance from the Earth to the Sun) from the parent star.
This makes it a gas giant with the shortest orbital period ever discovered in the history of science. The equilibrium temperature of the planet TOI-2109b, according to calculations, is about 3646 Kelvin, which allowed the researchers to classify it as a superhot Jupiter.
The parent star TOI-2109 is about 70 percent larger than the Sun and has an estimated mass of 1.45 solar masses. Its luminosity is 4.71 that of our star, its effective temperature is at 6530 Kelvin, and its metallicity is at 0.068. The star is about 1.77 billion years old and is located about 854 light years from Earth.
Astronomers believe that due to the extreme proximity of the planet to the star, the TOI-2109 system is an ideal “laboratory” for studying the process of tidal rupture of planets by the gravity of a star.
The research appeared on the arxiv.org preprint server.
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