(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, USA, recently discovered three planets orbiting dangerously close to late-life parent stars.
Among the thousands of extrasolar planets discovered to date, these three gas giants, first discovered by NASA‘s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), have the shortest orbital periods of any planet orbiting a giant or subgiant. One of these planets, TOI-2337b, will be consumed by its parent star in less than 1 million years, faster than any other planet known to science.
“These discoveries are important for understanding an important trend in exoplanet studies – the evolution of planetary systems over time,” explained study lead author Samuel Grunblatt, a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History and the Flatiron Institute in New York.
According to researchers, the masses of the planets are in the range from 0.5 to 1.7 Jupiter masses, and their sizes start from about the size of the largest planet in the solar system and up to 1.6 the size of Jupiter.
The densities of the matter of the planets vary over a wide range, ranging from the density of a cork to a density exceeding the density of water by about three times, which may indicate a wide range of possible ways for the formation of planets.
“We believe these three planets are just the tip of the iceberg. We expect to discover dozens and hundreds of such evolved planetary systems using the TESS observatory and gain new details about the interaction of planets with each other, their inflation and migration around stars, including sun-like stars,” said co-author Nick Saunders (Nick Saunders) from the Hawaiian Institute of Astronomy. university.
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