Giant planet PTFO8-8695 b is believed to orbit a star in the constellation Orion every 11 hours.
Gravity from the newborn star appears to be pulling away the outer layers of the Jupiter-like planet.
Illustration credit: A. Passwaters/Rice University
Gravity from the newborn star appears to be pulling away the outer layers of the Jupiter-like planet.
Illustration credit: A. Passwaters/Rice University
Astronomers searching for the galaxy’s youngest planets have found compelling evidence for one unlike any other, a newborn “hot Jupiter” whose outer layers are being torn away by the star it orbits every 11 hours...
“We don’t yet have absolute proof this is a planet because we don’t yet have a firm measure of the planet’s mass, but our observations go a long way toward verifying this really is a planet,” Johns-Krull said. “We compared our evidence against every other scenario we could imagine, and the weight of the evidence suggests this is one of the youngest planets yet observed.”
Dubbed “PTFO8-8695 b,” the suspected planet orbits a star about 1,100 light years from Earth and is at most twice the mass of Jupiter...
“We don’t know the ultimate fate of this planet,” Johns-Krull said. “It likely formed farther away from the star and has migrated in to a point where it’s being destroyed. We know there are close-orbiting planets around middle-aged stars that are presumably in stable orbits. What we don’t know is how quickly this young planet is going to lose its mass and whether it will lose too much to survive.”
Astronomers have discovered more than 3,300 exoplanets, but almost all of them orbit middle-aged stars like the sun. On May 26, Johns-Krull, Prato and co-authors announced the discovery of ‘CI Tau b,’ the first exoplanet found to orbit a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas. Johns-Krull said finding such young planets is challenging because there are relatively few candidate stars that are young enough and bright enough to view in sufficient detail with existing telescopes. The search is further complicated by the fact that young stars are often active, with visual outbursts and dimmings, strong magnetic fields and enormous starspots that can make it appear that planets exist where they do not...
