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Updated March 16th, 2021 at 18:40 IST

Scientists find gigantic exoplanet KELT-9b 'hotter than 80% of all stars'

Scientists found that the humongous exoplanet’s daytime temperature hit an alarming 7,800º Fahrenheit or 4,300º Celsius, hotter than the stars and Orb.

Reported by: Zaini Majeed
Scientists
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NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission’s previously discovered exoplanet dubbed  KELT-9 b or HD 195689 b is found to be “hotter than the stars” with record temperatures that exceeded the hottest giant exoplanet Orb. About the size of Jupiter, the humongous exoplanet’s daytime temperature hit an alarming 7,800º Fahrenheit or 4,300º Celsius, particularly so hot according to the scientists, that it literally boiled away in space. “We’re fascinated with the weirdness that nature hands us,” said B. Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at the Ohio State University who helmed the study published in the journal Nature, and recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

An astronomer at Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Maryland, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, John Ahlers, explained that KELT-9 b’s high temperature were extremely weird as the giant exoplanet was close to the polar orbit located next to a rapidly rotating bright star Sadr and it was odd that it turned out to be a “very hot” Jupiter approximately 670 light-years away. The exoplanet, about 1.8 times larger than Jupiter has characteristics traits like the Earth’s moon, experiences 2 summers, 2 winters, and each of its seasons lasts about 9 hours. It orbits its host star in just 36 hours, implying it must have a hot pole and a cool equator. But scientists found that the oblate spheroid-shaped Kelt-9 b, which was twice the size of the sun, was 56 percent hotter than the sun, and 38 times faster, comparatively. 

Kelt-9 b’s ultra-hot atmosphere could likely be due to the thermal inversions because of the presence of titanium oxide (TiO), vanadium oxide (VO), iron hydride (FeH), and other metal hydride/oxides on its surface, scientists Quentin Changeat and Billy Edwards said in the study. It is the hottest exoplanet discovered yet, with its atmosphere dominated by neutral hydrogen, they further revealed. Scientists analyzed the exoplanet’s eclipse spectrum obtained from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. Despite being at a distance nearly 10 times more than Mercury is to the sun, kelt-9 b is 90 percent hotter than most of the stars in the universe. This could be due to the chemical and thermal processes that changed its atmospheric dynamics.

[Credit:  NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center]

[Credit:  NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center/ESA]

‘Super-Earth’ planets 

Earlier, similarly, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered three ‘Super-Earth’ planets located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where rocky planet presumably has liquid water. Astronomers said that the findings were a breakthrough in identifying the extra-terrestrial life outside the solar system with perfect atmospheric conditions. Observed some 73 light-years away from Earth, the trio planets do not exist in the solar systems and are between the size of Earth and Neptune, packed in the system known as TOI-270 revealing key mysteries about “super-Earths”. TESS spotted the planets that were visible within the range of ground-based telescope and NASA’s orbiting instrument James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

(Image Credit: NASA)

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Published March 16th, 2021 at 18:40 IST

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