![]() An August 2023 study in the scientific journal Icarus found that Neptune itself had mysteriously vanishing clouds and offered a tantalizing hypothesis as to why this was happening: Simply put, the culprit was ultraviolet rays. This is not the first recent news related to either Neptune or, in the case of TOI-1853 b, Neptune-like planets. "These collisions stripped away some of the lighter atmosphere and water leaving a substantially rock-enriched, high-density planet." Our work shows that this can happen if the planet experienced extremely energetic planet-planet collisions during its formation. "TOI-1853b is the size of Neptune but has a density higher than steel. "This planet is very surprising! Normally we expect planets forming with this much rock to become gas giants like Jupiter which have densities similar to water," Jingyao Dou, study co-author and postgraduate student at Bristol, said in a statement. If nothing else, TOI-1853 b is remarkable because "the discovery of exoplanets in the hot-Neptune desert, a region close to the host stars with a deficit of Neptune-sized planets, provides insights into the formation and evolution of planetary systems, including the existence of this region itself." ![]() "The properties of TOI-1853 b present a puzzle for conventional theories of planetary formation and evolution, and could be the result of several proto-planet collisions or the final state of an initially high-eccentricity planet that migrated closer to its parent star," the authors conclude. "The properties of TOI-1853 b present a puzzle for conventional theories of planetary formation and evolution." Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. Eventually, according to this hypothesis, the exoplanet TOI-1853 b moved so close to the star TOI-1853 that it transferred its atmosphere to that star, culminating in a situation where tidal interactions between TOI-1853 and TOI-1853b created a more regular orbit for TOI-1853 b around TOI-1853. If that happened, one of them could been bounced into its current unusual orbit while gathering denser materials from the inner portions of its planet-forming disk. Yet this hypothesis is somewhat undermined by the fact that when planets crash into each other, they usually form multiple bodies rather than just one.Īnother possibility is that a group of gas giants had formed in a farther obit more traditional for those types of planets, but that their orbits somehow destabilized. As a result, the shattered individual planets formed a massive new planet in its unorthodox location second from its star. This would essentially be the planetary equivalent of a twin consuming its sibling in the womb. ![]() When their orbits destabilized, the planets may have begun crashing into each other, one right after another, forming one large, dense planet. If true, this would mean that a number of smaller planets once orbited this exoplanet's host star, TOI-1853. What explains the existence of this freakishly large, freakishly heavy planet where a year is roughly the length of a Monday? A team of scientists, led by Luca Naponiello of University of Rome Tor Vergata and the University of Bristol, have a doozy of a hypothesis: TOI-1853 b was created when many other planets smashed together. Why "diamond rain" could be normal weather across the universe ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |