It has just half the mass of Earth but is slightly larger than Mars with a diameter of 5,500 miles. The planet, called GJ 367 b, is smaller than most exoplanets discovered so far, which tend to be comparable in size to Jupiter. And the planet is bombarded with radiation that is over 500 times stronger than the radiation on Earth. Its host star, located relatively nearby at 31 light-years' distance, is a red dwarf which is smaller and cooler than our sun, but even so, the planet is so close that its surface temperature could reach up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Hints of a planet in the habitable zone of a dead starĪstronomers from the German Aerospace Center Institute of Planetary Research have discovered a terrifying planet: Smaller than Earth and so close to its star that it completes an orbit in just eight hours. Pair of brown dwarfs orbit each other 12 billion miles apart Hubble Space Telescope finds destructive white dwarf ripping apart planetary pieces The research is published in the journal Nature.Īmateur astronomer spots dwarf galaxy that computers missedĪstronomers find remnants of planets around 10 billion-year-old stars But for now, the exact reason remains a mystery. The team is puzzling over this finding, and theorizes that it could be due to the very cold temperatures of Quaoar which are stopping the particles in the ring from sticking together to form a moon. But Quaoar’s ring is well outside the Roche limit. When the material gets close to a massive body like a planet, it is pulled apart by gravity once it passes a point called the Roche limit to form a ring. Quaoar has a small moon called Weywot, and astronomers would expect that the material in the ring would also coalesce into a moon. There’s something strange about this ring though. The moment we saw that we said, ‘Okay, we are seeing a ring around Quaoar,’” said lead researcher Bruno Morgado. “When we put everything together, we saw drops in brightness that were not caused by Quaoar, but that pointed to the presence of material in a circular orbit around it. These results enabled them to see the dwarf planet and its ring. “The Cheops data are amazing for signal to noise,” Pagano said. It took several attempts, but the team was able to observe an occultation and were very pleased with the results. “I was a little skeptical about the possibility to do this with CHEOPS,” said one of the CHEOPS researchers, Isabella Pagano, in a statement. See four dwarf galaxies merging into one in this Hubble image Hubble revisits a funky irregular dwarf galaxy Hubble is investigating mysterious ‘spokes’ in Saturn’s rings The planet itself is small, at just 690 miles across, but the ring around it is much larger - at seven and a half times its radius. The ring was spotted around the dwarf planet Quaoar, located in the Kuiper belt around 44 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. ESA Acknowledgement: Work performed by ATG under contract for ESA Using a collection of ground-based telescopes, and ESA’s space-based telescope Cheops, astronomers watched as Quaoar crossed in front of a succession of distant stars, briefly blocking out their light as it passed. Quaoar’s ring was discovered through a series of observations that took place between 2018 to 2021. Quaoar’s moon Weywot is shown on the left. An artist’s impression of the dwarf planet Quaoar and its ring. The European Space Agency’s CHEOPS telescope usually searches for planets outside our solar system, but recently it made a discovery closer to home: a large ring around the dwarf planet Quaoar which has researchers intrigued.
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