“It will ultimately end up being engulfed. Death by star.”
The roughly Jupiter-sized planet is searingly hot, orbiting its star once every three days. In follow-up observations from 2019 to 2022, the planet kept transiting the star earlier than expected., Chontos and colleagues report December 19 in the“You can see the interval between the transits is shrinking, really slowly but really consistently, at a rate of 131 milliseconds per year,” says astrophysicist Shreyas Vissapragada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
That doesn’t sound like much. But if this trend continues, the planet has only 2 million or 3 million years left to live. “For something that’s been around for 2 to 3years, that’s pretty short,” Vissapragada says. If the planet’s lifetime was a more human 100 years, it would have a little more than a month left.
Studying Kepler 1658b as it dies will help explain the life cycles of similar planets. “Learning something about the actual physics of how orbits shrink over time, we can get a better handle on the fates of all of these planets,” Vissapragada says.
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