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However, the exoplanet 55 Cancri e goes by many names The most famous of them is the rocky world, located 40 light years from Earth for its reputation as “Hell’s Planet”.
A rocky planet eight times the size of Earth and twice as wide, it has been dubbed Giant-Earth. A sea of molten lava on the surface up to 3,600°F (1,982°C).
The interior of an exoplanet can also be filled with diamonds.
The planet is hotter than ever Compared to Star Wars A world of lava yellowishThe site of the battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Revenge of the Sith” where Darth Vader later established Fort Vader as his stronghold.
The planet, officially named Janssen but also referred to as 55 Cangri E or 55 CNCE, 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 takes about 17.5 hours on Earth.
The incredibly tight orbit is why Janssen has sweltering temperatures, practically hugging a host star that astronomers suspect has a planet.
Astronomers have wondered whether a planet is always this close to its star.
To determine the exact nature of the planet’s orbit, the team of researchers used a new instrument called EXPRES, or Extreme Primer Spectrometer. The findings will help astronomers gain new insights into planet formation and how these celestial bodies form. orbit.
A team led by Yale University developed the tool Astronomer Debra Fisher and the rover on the Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, USA. Arizona. The spectrometer was able to measure subtle changes in starlight from the Copernicus-Jansen transition between our planet and star, when the moon blocks out the sun during a solar eclipse.
The researchers determined that Jansen was orbiting 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 think Johnson’s eccentric orbit means the planet initially started out in a cooler, more distant orbit before closing in on Copernicus. Subsequently, the pull of gravity from the star’s equator changed Johnson’s orbit.
magazine natural astronomy A study detailing the findings was released on Thursday.
“Astronomers expect the planet to form very far away and orbit in its current orbit,” study senior author Eugene Higgins, a professor of astronomy at Yale University, said in a statement. “This flight may have pushed the planet out of the star’s equatorial plane, but this result shows that the planet is tight.”
Despite the fact that Jansen wasn’t always close to its star, the astronomers concluded that the exoplanet was always hot.
The planet was “too hot for anything we know to survive on the surface,” said Lily Zhao, research assistant at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York.
Once Johnson approached the hellish planet Copernicus It got hotter.
Our solar system is flat as a pancake. All planets revolve around the sun in a flat plane because they all formed from the same disk of gas and dust that once surrounded our sun.
When astronomers studied other planetary systems, they found that many of them do not harbor planets orbiting on a 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 what planets and Earth-like environments in the universe might look like.
“We hope to find planetary systems similar to our own and better understand the systems we know about,” Zhao said.
The main objective of the EXPRES instrument is to discover Earth-like planets.
“Our accuracy with Express is 1,000 times better today than when I started as a planet hunter 25 years ago,” said Fisher. “Improving the accuracy of measurements has been a primary goal of my career, as it allows us to find minor planets when searching for isotopes of the Earth.”
