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Weird ancient planet: the earth is full of desert, the sky is flooded

According to Sci-News, this is a planet named TOI-220b, located in the TOI-220 system 290 light years from Earth and in the constellation Pictor.

Lead author of the study, Dr Sergio Hoyer of the University of Aix Marseille (France), said the world they discovered could reveal a lot of information about the planets that formed in “the dawn ”of the universe. This new planet is a gaseous planet, about 3 times the size of Earth but 13.8 times heavier, with a density of 2.73 g / cm3.

Its mother star is a K-type dwarf that is 10 billion years old, and a planet would normally not be much younger than its “mother” age.

TOI-220b revolves around its parent star every 10.7 days at a distance of only 9% of the Sun’s distance from Earth. Due to its extreme proximity to its mother star, it is located in a “lethal” region of the star system, known as the “Neptune Desert”.

Dr Hoyer and his co-authors estimate the temperature of the planet to be around 533 degrees Celsius, and of course barely habitable. However, its atmosphere is a “submerged” space, which is rich in water to the point of “supercritical”. Its atmosphere can be composed mainly of hydrogen / helium. On the other hand, inside this gaseous crust filled with water is a mantle rich in silicates, like a strange “underground desert”. Its inner core is made of iron and is very large.

Published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they said to find out the nature of this ancient monstrous planet, they used the HARPS spectrometer on the 3.6-meter La Silla telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). to better analyze the initial data. recorded by the “exoplanet hunter” – NASA’s TESS space telescope.

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