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However, the exoplanet 55 Cancri e has several names The rocky world located 40 light years from Earth is the most famous for its reputation as “Hell’s Planet”.
This giant Earth, so called because it is a rocky planet eight times the mass of the Earth and twice as wide, and is so hot that it contains molten lava ocean at the surface up to 3,600°F (1,982°C).
The interior of an exoplanet can also be filled with diamonds.
The planet is hot enough to be compared to star wars lava world yellowishthe site of the battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Revenge of the Sith”, and where Darth Vader later established his stronghold, Fortress Vader.
The planet, officially named Janssen but also referred to as 55 Cancri e or 55 Cnc e, orbits its host star Copernicus so closely that the busy world completes one orbit in less than an Earth day. A year for this planet lasts about 17.5 Earth hours.
The incredibly close orbit is why Jansen has such sweltering temperatures, so close that astronomers have questioned the possibility of a planet practically hugging a host star.
Astronomers have wondered whether a planet is always this close to its star.
A team of researchers has used a new instrument known as EXPRES, or the EXtreme PREcision Spectrometer, to determine the exact nature of the planet’s orbit. The findings could help astronomers gain new insights into planet formation and how these celestial bodies evolve orbit.
The tool was developed at Yale by a team led by by astronomer Debra Fisher and installed on the Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The spectrometer was able to measure small shifts in Copernicus’ starlight as Jansen moved between our planet and the star, much like when the moon blocks out the sun during a solar eclipse.
The researchers determined that Jansen orbits the star’s equator. But Hell isn’t the only planet orbiting Copernicus. Four other planets on different orbital paths populate the star system.
Astronomers believe Jansen’s eccentric orbit indicates that the planet initially started out in a cooler, more distant orbit before closing in on Copernicus. Then, the pull of gravity from the star’s equator changed Jansen’s orbit.
magazine natural astronomy A study detailing the findings was released on Thursday.
“Astronomers expect this planet to have formed far away and then crashed into its current orbit,” Fisher, the study’s senior author and Eugene Higgins professor of astronomy at Yale University, said in a statement. “This flight could have ejected the planet from the star’s equatorial plane, but this result shows that the planet is very compact.”
Despite the fact that Jansen wasn’t always close to its star, the astronomers concluded that the exoplanet was always hot.
“The planet was probably so hot that nothing we knew would be able to survive on the surface,” study lead author Lily Zhao, a researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York at the Flatiron, said in a statement. Institute.
Once Jansen approached Copernicus – the planet of Hell It got hotter.
Our solar system is flat as a pancake, with all planets orbiting the sun in a flat plane because they all formed from the same disk of gas and dust that once orbited the sun.
When astronomers studied other planetary systems, they found that many of them do not host planets orbiting in a single flat plane, which raises the question of how unique our solar system is in the universe.
This type of data can provide more insight into how planets and Earth-like environments exist in the universe.
“We hope to find planetary systems similar to our own and better understand the systems we already know about,” Zhao said.
The main objective of the EXPRES instrument is to discover Earth-like planets.
“Our accuracy with EXPRES is more than 1,000 times better today than it was 25 years ago, when I started out as a planet hunter,” said Fisher. “Improving the accuracy of measurements has been the main focus of my career because it allows us to discover smaller planets while looking for Earth analogues.”
