At a distance of 850 light-years, an exoplanet is racing around its star in record time, and its fate is predetermined: TOI-2109b orbits its sun in just 16 hours and is attracted to it very quickly at the same time. In an astronomically short time, he will finally rise to the star Ian Wong of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his team write in Astronomical Journal.. With this year so short, the gas giant trimmed the previous record holder by another two hours.
TOI-2109b is a superheated gas giant that is five times larger than Jupiter. Its diameter is also 35 percent larger. At the same time, it is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury, which makes the planet extremely hot. On the day side, temperatures reach at least 3000 degrees Celsius, making it an extremely hot Jupiter. So far we only know of one planet that is hotter, with a surface temperature of 4,300 degrees Celsius.
The proximity to its star also means that the celestial body is approaching its end faster than any other known planet, the task force wrote. Every year, orbital velocity decreases by another second. In about ten million years, the star will have swallowed the gas giant, according to Wong and Co.
Due to its high temperature and brightness of the star, the exoplanet is easy to observe. Above all, its atmosphere can be well examined. It was discovered with the help of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
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