Some exoplanets are so close to their stars they'll death spiral into them. On their way, they'll inflate, before eventually being engulfed.
Astronomers have spied three more exoplanets. But the discovery might not last long. Each planet is in a separate solar system, and each orbits perilously close to its star. Even worse, all of the stars are dying.TESS and other planet-hunting endeavours have found thousands of exoplanets in the last few years and decades. The exoplanets vary widely, from Earth-like planets in their stars’ quiet habitable zones to planets so hot that vaporized iron falls as rain.
“These discoveries are crucial to understanding a new frontier in exoplanet studies: how planetary systems evolve over time,” Grunblatt said in a press release. “These observations offer new windows into planets nearing the end of their lives before their host stars swallow them up.” The planets have a wide range of densities, which indicates that each of the solar systems underwent a chaotic period of planet-to-planet interactions. Astronomers think that the history of those interactions contributed to the density variations through unpredictable heating rates and timescales.
Planetary inflation is becoming an important metric in understanding exoplanets. Why do some planets as massive as Jupiter have much greater radii? Gas giants experience radiative cooling from their inner depths, inhibiting inflation over long timescales, beginning shortly after formation. Proximity to a star might delay that cooling and promote inflation.
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