An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a system made up of two celestial bodies. One of them is a cooled star, and the second is a planet similar to Jupiter, whose surface temperature is even higher than the temperature of the Sun.
The study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, and Phys.org talks briefly about it. The discovered system is located at a distance of about 1400 light years from us. Scientists call it the most extreme of all known systems in terms of temperature. The characteristics of celestial objects were studied by analyzing spectroscopic data collected by the Very Large Telescope located in Chile.
“We have identified a hot Jupiter-like object orbiting a star, which is the hottest ever found,” said study lead author Dr. Naama Hallakun. “It is about 2,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the Sun.” .
Unlike other “warm Jupiters”, the discovered planet also turned out to be very large relative to its parent star, around which it revolves. Calculations showed that this star is 10 thousand times dimmer than ordinary stars. As for the planet, it belongs to the type of objects that astronomers call “failed stars.” Such celestial bodies have both the characteristics of planets and stars.
The discovered red-hot giant revolves around a white dwarf. It was once a Sun-like star, but it has already used up all its nuclear fuel and shed its outer coverings. The red-hot giant is an object classified as a brown dwarf. The mass of such celestial bodies is somewhere between the mass of a gas giant, such as Jupiter, and a small star. Brown dwarfs, unlike gas giants, are massive enough to resist the “pull” of their companion stars.
“The gravity of stars can cause objects that come too close to break up, but this brown dwarf is very dense, its mass is 80 times the mass of Jupiter, and it is compressed to the size of Jupiter,” explains Hallakun. “This allowed it to survive safely and form a stable binary system.”
The measurement of temperatures also amazed scientists. It turned out that the temperature on the day side of the “hellish” planet ranges from 7000 to 9500 degrees Celsius (it turned out to be a record for planets of this class), and on the night side – from 1000 to 2700 degrees Celsius. . That is, the temperature difference between the two hemispheres is about 6000 degrees.
