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StarDate, the longest-running national radio science feature in the U.S., tells listeners what to look for in the night sky.
A recently discovered planet is facing its final days. It’s evaporating, leaving a trail of debris that stretches halfway along its orbit.
The planet is known by a catalog number – BD +05 4868 Ab. It’s only the fourth evaporating planet ever seen.
It orbits the main star in a binary system in Pegasus, which is in the eastern sky at nightfall. The star is smaller and fainter than the Sun, and more than twice the age of the Sun.
The planet was discovered by TESS, a planet-hunting space telescope. The planet passes in front of its parent star once every 30.5-hour orbit, blocking some of the star’s light. But the dips in starlight are ragged and look different from orbit to orbit. That suggests the planet is shedding material, forming a lumpy trail.
The planet is small, and it orbits the star at just two percent of the distance from Earth to the Sun. At that range, it’s heated to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That vaporizes minerals at the surface. The vapor boils into space, where it cools and condenses to form solid grains. That creates a thick trail that extends both behind and ahead of the planet.
As more of the planet vaporizes, its gravity weakens, allowing even more material to escape. So the planet could vanish entirely in as little as a million years.
Astronomers will look at the system with Webb Space Telescope – revealing more details about this vanishing planet.
Script by Damond Benningfield
StarDate
StarDate, the longest-running national radio science feature in the U.S., tells listeners what to look for in the night sky.
