Weird alien planet may be core of stripped-down gas giant

[Admin]

A distant world about 40 times more massive than Earth may be the remnant core of a giant planet, or a giant planet in the making whose growth stalled, a new study reports.

Weird alien planet may be core of stripped-down gas giant : Read more

 

[rod]

FYI. I note in this report, "However, as much as the light from TOI-849b's star would sear the exoplanet, the scientists noted such heating alone might still not strip a gas giant's atmosphere down to nearly the planet's core. They estimated the star is about 6.7 billion years old. Given that amount of time, as well as TOI-849b's distance from its star, they calculated a Jupiter-like gas giant would have lost only a few percent of its mass due to stellar radiation to date...All in all, TOI-849b may give scientists a glimpse at what the core of a gas giant looks like. Future research may directly observe that core's composition by analyzing evaporated material in the exoplanet's remaining atmosphere. Further work may also investigate whether this exoplanet actually was a gas giant whose atmosphere was stripped away by the light from its star. "They claim that it's unlikely, but these calculations are hard to do," Raymond said. The new study, which was led by David Armstrong of the University of Warwick in England, has been accepted by the journal Nature. You can read a preprint of the paper for free at arXiv.org."

Another report shows the core gas giant interpretation, is tentative as well, ref - http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/toi-849_b/, "Armstrong et al. (2020) : TOI-489 b is probably a remnant planetary core. The equilibrium telmperature is computed assuming an albedo of 0.3."

The gas giant core view remains to be confirmed. If this exoplanet formed in situ, problems show up in protoplanetary disk accretion. Also the age calculation for the host star is not as straight forward as H-R diagrams for open clusters and globular clusters showing main sequence turn-off ages.

 

[rod]

FYI. This report concerned an exoplanet in the Neptune type desert region. I reviewed this list just now using MS SQL, 4248 confirmed exoplanets. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia My SQL query returned 77 exoplanets with masses in the range 17 to 41 earth masses. The average mass is 28.87 earth masses with average orbital period 34.22 earth days. It seems there are more issues here with possible gas giant cores vs. in situ formation. Our solar system is not configured like this, especially with large mass planets orbiting inside the Earth's distance.

 

[Alan Lowey]

I propose that this core is dark matter which also exists at Earth’s core. I predict that it’s 3D orbit will show that it “hesitates” when crossing the solar plane.
This is analogous to SO-2 which will be shown to “hesitate” when crossing the galactic plane.