As a planet gets too close to its own star, its atmosphere is sucked in and drags a comet-shaped tail.
According to National Geographic, the planet HD 209458b is made up mainly of gas. It is about 153 light years from Earth and about the size of Jupiter. The gaseous planet is so close to its own star that its year is only 3.5 days – shorter than that of Mercury (88 days).
The strange planet HD 209458b has helped prove that the “Jupiter’s displacement” theory is real. For a long time, astronomers believed that Jupiter – the first planet formed in the solar system – was actually born in a location further from the Sun than the present, and then gradually moved inward, greatly impacting the formation of ‘other small rocky planets, including Earth. In the new study conducted by the University of Warwick (UK), a similar moving planet has been confirmed for the first time.
HD 209458b is always on the move – research just published in Nature confirms this. The team used the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, a “super telescope” located in La Palma, Spain, and obtained a high resolution spectrum of the atmosphere from HD 209458b in four times as it scanned its mother following the direction of Earth observation.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Cynthia Froning of the University of Colorado, USA, and her colleagues discovered a trail of gas escaping from HD 209458b and heading towards Earth at a speed of about 35,400 km / h.
According to Sci-tech Daily, they found hydrogen cyanide, methane, ammonia, acetylene, carbon monoxide and a small amount of water vapor in the atmosphere of HD 209458b. The surprising abundance of carbon-based molecules (hydrogen cyanide, methane, acetylene, and carbon monoxide), twice the expected amount of carbon, suggests that the planet must accumulate a lot of carbon in the process of formation. This can only happen on planets far removed from the parent star.
However, hydrogen cyanide, methane, acetylene and carbon monoxide are now only 7 million kilometers away, less than a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Sun.
“It is impossible for a planet to form with an atmosphere very rich in carbon if it were in the current of condensation of water vapor. At the temperature of the very hot planet (1227 degrees C), if the atmosphere contained everything. The elements of in the same proportions as in the mother star, oxygen will be twice as abundant as carbon and will bind mainly with hydrogen to form water or carbon to form carbon monoxide ” – explains Dr Siddharth Gandhi of the Faculty of the University of Warwick Physics.
According to Dr. Matteo Brogi, another member of the research team, the discovery also provides a way to classify planets based on their location of formation and initial evolution, as well as the basis of their determination. compounds according to their spectroscopy.
