According to astronomy, planets the size of Neptune couldn’t possibly form and sustain
any kind of atmosphere while orbiting their parent stars at a close proximity.
Well, forget what I just said, -- because I didn’t quite understand any of it either
– but last year, astronomers found exactly this kind of planet!
And it’s not the only planet that defies all our knowledge.
Will scientists have to reconsider their picture of the Universe?
Ooh -- Let’s find out!
Exoplanets are the hottest topic in astronomy right now, and with every new discovery, we’re
getting more and more confident of our view of the Universe we live in.
But some of those discoveries simply baffle the mind!
The planet I’m talking about is called NGTS-4b.
I like Vulcan better, but they didn’t ask me.
That planet was found by the Next-Generation Transit Survey, or NGTS, located in the Atacama
Desert, Chile.
This base of robotic exoplanet search is aimed at finding super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets.
It uses a method that measures the dimming of a star, which happens when a planet crosses
the line between a star and a point of observation.
The duration and magnitude of the dimming help to figure out the size, density, and
how far the exoplanet is from its parent star.
NGTS-4b is, at least for now, the only known sub-Neptune sized planet that orbits its star
in a so-called “Neptunian Desert”.
And it’s called Desert for a reason; the radiation coming from the stars in Neptunian
Deserts is pretty vicious.
Normally it would evaporate any kind of atmosphere from any planets in close proximity and leave
them as small, blazing-hot rocks.
Scientists can only guess at why this didn’t happen to NGTS-4b.
This planet still has an atmosphere, and it’s about 80% of the size of Neptune.
It orbits the star at an astonishing speed – a full circle in 1.3 days.
One suggestion is that the planet wasn’t always that close to the star and it just
recently migrated there, so its atmosphere is evaporating right now.
Another possible explanation for the existence of NGTS-4b is that its atmosphere was a lot
larger in the past and we’ve found it just in time to watch the final round of the show.
That would mean that we can observe the process and see for ourselves how it happens.
And this isn’t the first surprising discovery of NGTS.
On October 31, 2017, the NGTS-1b planet was discovered.
This planet is a hot-gas giant, almost exactly the same size as our neighbor Jupiter.
But the strange thing about this planet is that it orbits a red dwarf star that’s only
half the size of our Sun.
This has never been seen before, and in theory, such huge planets shouldn’t orbit stars
so small.
There probably won’t be a sensible explanation for this until other similar planets are found.
But for now – nobody knows how it’s possible!
A Neptune-sized planet so close to its star and huge planets orbiting small stars are
puzzling enough, but how about the planet that should’ve been swallowed by its star
by now, but still stands firm in its orbit?
That’s right, something like this was also found in the vast space of the Universe.
Kepler-78b is the planet.
We’ll have a quiz on these names later.
It’s just a little bit bigger than the Earth.
It’s supposedly as dense as the Earth and has a similar composition, but it’s even
closer to its host star than NGTS-4b.
One year on this planet lasts only 8.5 hours; that’s how long it takes for the planet
to go full circle around the star.
The closest planet to our Sun, Mercury, is about 36 million miles from it.
Kepler-78b orbits its star at a distance of less than 1.5 times the diameter of the star
itself.
That’s less than 1 billion miles from the surface of the star, and as far as we know,
it’s absolutely impossible.
Kepler-78b is constantly getting closer and closer to the star it orbits, and one day,
it’ll be swallowed by it.
But for now, the planet stands firm.
And that’s not even the most puzzling part; how, in a name of the Universe, did this planet
even come to be?
As far as we know, there’s absolutely no way for a planet like Kepler-78b to be formed
so close to a star, and there’s also no way for it to migrate so close without crashing
into the star.
More than that, if you imagine how things were when the planet was formed, it appears
that its star was even bigger at that time.
And that means that Kepler-78b was formed… right in the place where the star once was?
This simply doesn’t make any sense for astronomers today.
All they can do is collect more information about this planet and hope to find other similar
ones, so they can learn more about planet formation in the future.
Now, let’s turn from blazing desert planets at risk of being devoured by their own suns,
to somewhere really dark.
To a planet that’s so far from its star, it shouldn’t exist.
The planet I’m talking about is – prepare yourself because it’s going to be a mouthful
– HD 106906 b.
For simplicity, lt’s just call it “Bob”.
This planet is the only known companion orbiting not one star, but two stars at the same time.
The planet is 11 times more massive than Jupiter and is orbiting the binary star at an unimaginable
distance.
It’s 69 billion miles away from the core of the system.
What’s even stranger is that this system is still really young, only 14 million years
old.
Just for a point of reference, our system is 4.5 billion years old!
How it’s possible for a planet this big to form this far from its parent star is just
incomprehensible.
Once again, the most possible explanation is that it was formed near the star but later
pushed farther out.
Yet there’s still one cool possibility.
This planet could’ve been a failed star.
This means that some collections of gas crashing into other similar clouds could react and
form a binary star system.
But what if one such gas-clump somehow failed and became a giant gas planet instead?
It’s possible, though it’s just a theory.
And finally, the big surprise: impossible planets may be a lot closer to us than you
think!
How about our own solar system?
You know all that buzz going on around Pluto?
At one time it’s a planet, and then suddenly it’s not.
What happened here?
Did Pluto forget to renew its planet license or something?
Jokes aside, there was a prediction that there’s some kind of ninth planet in the Solar System
long before the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
But about half a century later, when our technology was making a huge leap forward, we were able
to see that Pluto is just one of around 70,000 objects in its region of space.
There’s a big collection of asteroids, ice, and dust called the Kuiper Belt.
Here, other objects – some just as big as Pluto – were discovered.
And as we know, there can’t be several planets placed in the same orbit.
One object discovered in 2005, named Eris, is said to be even bigger than Pluto, but
it still can’t be called a planet.
At least Pluto got all the fame first, before Eris showed up.
It would be a closed case for the ninth planet, but this story seems to be much more complicated.
Evidence found in 2016 by astronomers Gongjie Li and Fred Adams, suggests that there actually
is a strange Planet X in the Solar system.
Only, it’s far more distant than even Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
We don’t know for sure exactly how far it is, but the estimated distance of its orbit
varies from 40 billion to 140 billion miles from the Sun.
That’s 400 to 1500 times farther than the Earth is from the Sun!
The problem is – contrary to all the evidence, it’s not supposed to be there.
We just don’t know any possible way for a planet to form at such distance from its
host star.
The most probable explanation for the Ninth Planet’s distance is that it was once a
gas-giant, like Jupiter, but it couldn’t compete, and the gravitational forces of other
planets pushed it further away.
While this is possible, another theory suggests that the Ninth Planet was formed at a great
distance in the first place, but then it was torn out from its orbit by another star passing
relatively near to the Sun.
It seems like similar things happened quite often when the Solar System was only starting
to form.
Still, the simulation shows that those explanations aren’t ideal.
The chances of the proposed scenarios coming to life are estimated from 2% to 10%.
In simple terms – all of them are quite unlikely!
Guess only time and lots of research will tell.
What do you think?
What are astronomers missing in their attempts to explain the origin of impossible planets?
What about impossible burgers?
Who knows, maybe your idea is the key to a better understanding of the Universe?
Let me know down in the comments!
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