Astronomy Located 2,600 light-years from Earth and about as big as Jupiter, Kepler-1658b is getting dangerously close to its star. An end that Earth might also experience?
Earth seen from space (Photo illustration) — Photo by Handout/NASA/AFP
Heatstroke come for Kepler-1658b… Astronomers have detected For the first time, a distant planet is getting dangerously close to its aging star, according to a study released Monday that gives a possible glimpse of how Earth could end up. /p>
Located at 2,600 light-years from Earth, Kepler-1658b is an exoplanet – i.e. a planet outside the solar system – at the edge of the planet. about as big as Jupiter. But unlike this gas giant far from the Sun, Kepler-1658b orbits around its star at only one eighth of the distance that separates our star from Mercury, the planet that is closest to it.
Collision in less than three million years
This “Hot Jupiter” orbits its star in less than three days, and this period of revolution is shortening by about 131 milliseconds per year, describes a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.< /p>
“At this rate, the planet will collide with its star in less than three million years,” says Shreyas Vissapragada of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics – Smithsonian, lead author of the study.
“This is the first direct evidence of a planet with a spiral path around its aging star,” AFP. The star in question is located at an advanced stage of its cycle, the one in which she begins to swell and getting brighter and brighter.
Kepler-1658b’s orbit is inexorably shrinking under the effect of gravity. exerted by the star, similar to that exerted by the Moon on different points of the Earth. This effect, called Tidal force can just as easily attract two bodies as it can pull them apart – the Moon for example moves very slowly away from the Earth with a spiral trajectory.< /p>
Same inevitable end for Earth?
Will our planet go through the same process of disintegration? “The death of a planet caused by a star is a fate that awaits many worlds and could be Earth’s ultimate farewell billions of years from now. as our Sun evolves,” the Center for Astrophysics wrote in a statement.
In about 5 billion years, the Sun will become a “ ;red giant” which will grow bigger and bigger, in the same line as the host star of Kepler-1658b.
Like the exoplanet, the Earth could move inexorably closer to the Sun under the effect of tidal forces. But this effect could also be counterbalanced. by the loss of mass of the Sun, says Shreyas Vissapragadan, stressing that “the ultimate fate of the Earth remains unclear”.
Kepler-1658b has been intriguing for thirteen years
Kepler-1658b has been the first exoplanet observed with the Kepler space telescope, in 2009. For 13 years, scientists had observed the slow but steady change in the orbit of the planet passing in front of its host star.
Finding it surprisingly bright compared to ; other exoplanets, they have long assumed that it reflected the starlight particularly well. They now believe that Kepler-1658b is even hotter than expected due to the attraction exerted by the star.