Astronomers Find Out What Happens to Rocky Planets That Wander too Close to Their Stars - by PaulMattSutter
The team of researchers released a paper detailing simulations of how this process could unfold. They found that these small worlds are caught between two extremes. Because they orbit closely to their parent star, they are almost certainly tidally locked, which means that only one side of the planet faces the star at all times. The other side is permanently locked in night. The day side gets blasted to such a degree that instead of a crust it just has a thin shell of pure magma.
The night side cools down the planet while the day side heats it up. The astronomers found that there is only a very narrow window where we can observe such situations. If a planet is too big or the star is not bright enough, then it does not evaporate enough material for us to detect it in something like Kepler. However if the planet is too small or the star is too intense, the entire planet obliterates in a short enough time that we are unlikely to see it in a random sample of stars.
Only certain special cases can lead to a ring of debris large enough and visible enough for us to see it. Going from this the astronomers estimate that for every star in the galaxy there is roughly one planet the size of the Earth or smaller. Additionally, the astronomers found that these debris trails can give us very important clues as to rocky planetary formation. We don’t normally get to crack open planets and see what’s inside of them. But in these cases the parent star is doing the job for us. They advocate for a follow-up observations with the James Webb Space telescope to study these systems in detail to understand what these rocky planets were made of.
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