Newly discovered 'mini-Neptune' may have an ocean or an atmosphere - but not for long

"Even though its host star HD-2047496 is only around 80% the mass of the sun and 79% the width of our star, it is still large enough for its gravity to strip the exoplanet of its hydrogen and helium atmosphere, the team's model suggested.

Most Neptune-like planets orbiting stars at such close distances would have had their atmospheres stripped and their oceans boiled away, with this being one of the suggested explanations for the fact that Neptune-like worlds are rarely found close to their stars, a problem called the "hot-Neptunian desert." The Neptune-sized or sub-Neptune-sized planets are thus reduced in size to rocky cores corresponding with so-called super-Earth exoplanets."

My observation. More study needed here to confirm just what the composition of this exoplanet is and if the atmosphere is lost and disappears over the next *half-billion years*. The surface gravity compared to Earth is 1.2047, escape velocity = 18.41 km/s. Atmospheric loss seems unlikely unless the star’s gravity does pull the atmosphere off the exoplanet into the host star.
 

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