A Neptune-sized planet orbits close enough to its star that it is bombarded by dramatic flares which cook the planet with radiation and strip its atmosphere.
Of the many strange exoplanets discovered to date, one of the most extreme has to be a world called AU Mic b. This Neptune-sized planet orbits close enough to its star that a year there lasts just over a week, and it is bombarded by dramatic flares from its host star which cook the planet with radiation.
“We’ve never seen atmospheric escape go from completely not detectable to very detectable over such a short period when a planet passes in front of its star,” said lead researcher Keighley Rockcliffe of Dartmouth College in a statement. “We were really expecting something very predictable, repeatable. But it turned out to be weird. When I first saw this, I thought ‘That can’t be right.'”
The researchers suggest that the strange variation in the planet’s atmospheric loss could be due to a particularly strong solar flare occurring shortly before Hubble took its measurements which could have ionized the hydrogen coming off the planet, making it invisible to Hubble’s instruments. Or it could be that the stellar winds do actually cause the atmospheric loss to vary considerably.
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