An exoplanet spiralling towards its death-by-star fate has been discovered by astronomers, a new study describing the results of the discovery said. According to the study, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have, for the first time, spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration, the study said.
The discovery offers new insights into the long-winded process of planetary orbital decay by providing the first look at a system at this late stage of evolution, the study said. Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth’s ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older. “We’ve previously detected evidence for exoplanets in-spiralling toward their stars, but we have never before seen such a planet around an evolved star,” said Shreyas Vissapragada, lead author of the new study.
“Theory predicts that evolved stars are very effective at sapping energy from their planets’ orbits, and now we can test those theories with observations,” said Vissapragada. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The ill-fated exoplanet is designated Kepler-1658b. As its name indicates, astronomers discovered the exoplanet with the Kepler space telescope, a pioneering planet-hunting mission that launched in 2009. It took nearly a decade to confirm the planet’s existence, at which time the object entered Kepler’s catalogue officially as the 1658th entry, the study said.
Kepler-1658b is a so-called hot Jupiter, the nickname given to exoplanets on par with Jupiter’s mass and size but in scorchingly ultra-close orbits about their host stars. For Kepler-1658b, that distance is merely an eighth of the space between our Sun and its tightest orbiting planet, Mercury. For hot Jupiters and other planets like Kepler-1658b that are already very close to their stars, orbital decay looks certain to culminate in destruction, the study said.
Measuring the orbital decay of exoplanets has challenged researchers because the process is very slow and gradual. In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds, thousandths of a second, per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star, the study said.
According to the study, detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation.The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star’s brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased, the study said.
According to the study, the root cause of the orbital decay experienced by Kepler-1658b is tides – the same phenomenon responsible for the daily rise and fall in Earth’s oceans. Tides are generated by gravitational interactions between two orbiting bodies, such as between our world and the Moon or Kepler-1658b and its star. The bodies’ gravities distort each other’s shapes, and as the bodies respond to these changes, energy is released.
Depending on the distances between, sizes, and rotation rates of the bodies involved, these tidal interactions can result in bodies pushing each other away – the case for the Earth and the slowly outward-spiralling Moon – or inward, as with Kepler-1658b toward its star, the study said.There is still a lot researchers do not understand about these dynamics, particularly in star-planet scenarios. Accordingly, further investigation of the Kepler-1658 system should prove instructive, the study said.
The star has evolved to the point in its stellar life cycle where it has started to expand, just as our Sun is expected to, and has entered into what astronomers call a subgiant phase. The internal structure of evolved stars should more readily lead to dissipation of tidal energy taken from hosted planets’ orbits compared to unevolved stars like our Sun. This accelerates the orbital decay process, making it easier to study on human timescales, the study said.
The results further help in explaining an intrinsic oddity about Kepler-1658b, which appears brighter and hotter than expected. The tidal interactions shrinking the planet’s orbit may also be cranking out extra energy within the planet itself, the team said.