Doom-spiraling exoplanet will someday meet fiery demise

[Admin]

Tidal interactions are pulling the exoplanet toward its demise: a fiery collision with its star.

Doom-spiraling exoplanet will someday meet fiery demise : Read more

 

[rod]

"Kepler-1658b is considered a "hot Jupiter," or an exoplanet with a similar mass and size as Jupiter, but a far hotter temperature due to its close proximity to its star. It was first spotted by NASA's retired exoplanet-hunter Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, but was not confirmed to be an exoplanet until 2019."

More exoplanets like this are found now potentially sprialing into their parent stars on very short time scales.

Aging Ungracefully, Sky & Telescope 145(1):14-19, 2023

"IMMINENT DEMISE If planets stayed put until their stars swelled to engulf them, then the hot Jupiter WASP-12b would have about 2 billion years in its future. But observations reveal that the planet’s orbit is decaying rapidly — in only 3 million years, it will plunge into the star."

Newly-found planets on the edge of destruction, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220113151415.htm

"Summary: Astronomers have found three Jupiter-like exoplanets that are dangerously close to being 'swallowed up' by their host stars. The discovery gives new insight into how planetary systems evolve over time, helping to reveal the fate of solar systems like our own." "Three newly-discovered planets have been orbiting dangerously close to stars nearing the end of their lives. Out of the thousands of extrasolar planets found so far, these three gas giant planets first detected by the NASA TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Mission, have some of the shortest-period orbits around subgiant or giant stars. One of the planets, TOI-2337b, will be consumed by its host star in less than 1 million years, sooner than any other currently known planet..."

This doomed alien planet has a year that lasts just 16 hours — it's only getting faster, https://forums.space.com/threads/th...ust-16-hours-—-its-only-getting-faster.51570/

Seems like some exoplanets observed today have very short lifetimes compared to stellar evolution model ages extending time back millions and billions of years for various stars and clusters.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I tseems that our planet detection methods are most sensitive to large planets neatr their stars. Those are the ones that cause the largest wobbles in the star's apparent position as seen from Earth, and those are the ones that make the biggest dimming effect when they transit their star's line-of-sight to Earth.

So, our searches for planets are likely to result in a population of detected exoplanets with an over-representation of these large planets very close to stars.

It would be useful to know how biased this sample is. I guess we really won't know until we can see most of the planets around most of the stars.