Scientists find young planet being destroyed by its star

A team of astronomers searching for the youngest planets in the galaxy uncovered a particularly tragic case: a young, newborn planet being disintegrated by its host star.

According to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, the planet is a planet around the size of Jupiter in an extremely tight orbit around its star, also known as a ‘hot Jupiter’. This particular doomed planet orbits a star in the constellation Orion every 11 hours.

“A handful of known planets are in similarly small orbits, but because this star is only 2 million years old this is one of the most extreme examples,” study author Christopher Johns-Krull, a Rice University astronomer, said in a news release.

“We don’t yet have absolute proof this is a planet because we don’t yet have a firm measure of the planet’s mass, but our observations go a long way toward verifying this really is a planet,” Johns-Krull added. “We compared our evidence against every other scenario we could imagine, and the weight of the evidence suggests this is one of the youngest planets yet observed.”

Not enough data to make definitive claims

The study team said they can’t make a definitive conclusion about the planet, dubbed “PTFO8-8695 b,” just yet.

“It likely formed farther away from the star and has migrated in to a point where it’s being destroyed,” Johns-Krull said. “We know there are close-orbiting planets around middle-aged stars that are presumably in stable orbits. What we don’t know is how quickly this young planet is going to lose its mass and whether it will lose too much to survive.”

Johns-Krull said observations revealed PTFO8-8695 b is only about 3 to 4 percent the size of the star, but light emitted from highly energized hydrogen atoms coming from the planet appears to be as bright as the same kind of light coming from the host star.

“There’s no way something confined to the planet’s surface could produce that effect,” he said. “The gas has to be filling a much larger region where the gravity of the planet is no longer strong enough to hold on to it. The star’s gravity takes over, and eventually the gas will fall onto the star.”

The researchers said discovering these kinds of young planets is tough because there aren’t many candidate stars young enough and brilliant enough to see in adequate detail. The hunt is made more challenging by the reality that young stars are often energetic, with wildly fluctuating brightness, powerful magnetic fields and massive sunspots that can make it look like planets exist where they don’t.

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Image credit: Rice University

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