Gas Giant’s Naked Core

Astronomers discovered an exoplanet that seems to be the naked core of a gas giant. The planet is smaller than Neptune yet much more massive.

Image by ChadoNihi from Pixabay

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The satellite known as TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) discovered a planet that needs only 18 hours to orbit around its planet. Ten, twenty years ago, this would be an amazing discovery on itself. But nowadays, we have seen many such hellish objects.

But, there is something different about the exoplanet TOI-849 b. It exists in a space that is considered to be the desert of solar systems and it is not only because of the insane temperatures that can be found there.

Desert Planet

Mercury needs 88 days to orbit around the Sun. And we have seen planets that need just days or even hours to orbit their star. There are two basic groups of short-orbit planets. Some are smaller than Earth and some are larger. But at a maximum, these planets tend to have a size of two Earths. But so far we have had no real idea where do these planets come from. Perhaps, these are the naked cores of planets similar to Neptune.

The second group is Hot Jupiters. Their orbit is larger than of the first group – usually around a few days – and the diameter of the planet is larger than 10 Earths. When it comes to Hot Jupiters, we have known for a long time how these exist. They get created farther apart from their star and over time they migrate towards the star.

But there is a void between the two groups. So it's considered a desert. But now we have found something. TOI-849 b. The planet has a diameter of 3.4 Earths making it a bit smaller than Neptune. Because of the absence of similarly sized planets, we call it the Neptune Desert. And this Neptune Desert is even bigger than when you combine mass and the orbiting period. Hot Jupiters tend to have a mass of 100 Earths and more and we do not even know how “light” the super-fast orbiting planets are – which most likely means that they are not very massive.

When ti came to TOI-849 b we managed to measure its mass with a spectrograph and it is surprisingly high. More than twice the mass of Neptune. What does that mean? That means the planet is incredibly dense – about 5500 kg per cubic meter.

If TOI-849 b has an atmosphere it is likely made form hydrogen and helium. But since it is incredibly close to its star it likely lost its atmosphere. So, TOI-849 b is most likely the naked core of a former gas giant. The first we have ever seen.

Sources:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10314

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