An international team of astronomers has discovered a late-stage star that harbors a planet it should have devoured.
, we can determine what material a star is burning. For Baekdu, the frequencies of the waves unambiguously showed it has commenced burning helium in its core.Gabriel Perez Diaz / Instituto de Astrofisica de CanariasThe discovery was puzzling: if Baekdu is burning helium, it should have been much bigger in the past – so big it should have engulfed the planet Halla.
As is often the case in scientific research, the first course of action was to rule out the most trivial explanation: that Halla never really existed.Indeed, some apparent discoveries of planets orbiting red giants using the Doppler wobble technique have later been shown to be illusionsHowever, follow-up observations ruled out such a false-positive scenario for Halla.
If the star Baekdu used to be a binary, there are two scenarios which can explain the survival of the planet Halla.A merger of these two stars may have prevented the expansion of either star to a size large enough to engulf planet Halla. If one star became a red giant on its own, it would have engulfed Halla – however, if it merged with a companion star it would jump straight to the helium-burning phase without getting big enough to reach the planet.
Alternatively, Halla may be a relatively newborn planet. The violent collision between the two stars may have produced a cloud of gas and dust from which the planet could have formed. In other words, the planet Halla may be a recently born “second generation” planet.Whichever explanation is correct, the discovery of a close-in planet orbiting a helium-burning red giant star demonstrates that nature finds ways for exoplanets to appear in places where we might least expect them.
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