from the hopefully-the-Atavachron-is-still-functional dept.
Every year, the planet inches closer to its star:
Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their stars. The first potential planet the telescope spotted was initially dismissed as a false alarm, but in 2019 astronomer Ashley Chontos and colleagues proved it was real (SN: 3/5/19). The planet was officially named Kepler 1658b.
Now, Chontos and others have determined Kepler 1658b's fate. "It is tragically spiraling into its host star," says Chontos, now at Princeton University. The planet has roughly 2.5 million years left before it faces a fiery death. "It will ultimately end up being engulfed. Death by star."
[...] "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 3 billion years, 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.
Journal Reference:
Shreyas Vissapragada, Ashley Chontos, Michael Greklek-McKeon, et al., The Possible Tidal Demise of Kepler's First Planetary System, ApJL, 941, 2022. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aca47e
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 22, @05:17PM (2 children)
The Earth is doomed too: A few billion more years, the Sun goes red giant, Earth is destroyed.
A bunch of other objects we've discovered are doomed to get sucked into a black hole in the near future. More stuff down the drain.
And of course everything else in the universe is also doomed: Either Heat Death or the Big Crunch gets us all in the end no matter what we do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 22, @06:27PM (1 child)
True. It's like when people talk about someone's life having been saved - no, their death was just postponed a little.
Still, there's a slight difference between being doomed in a couple million years, a couple billion, or several trillion, as a planet in a stable orbit around a red dwarf might get.
Kinda like being told you're going to die within hours versus next year, or a thousand years from now. You're dying regardless, but your plans are likely to change.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday December 23, @07:52PM
I hear Kepler 1658b is pretty stubborn, so I don't think it's going to change it's plans. It doesn't care that it's going to die; it's just going to keep smoking and getting a tan because why not? Life is short anyway. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, @08:03PM (1 child)
More from the link:
> 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.
Perhaps the reason it's spiraling-in is "air drag" from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_atmosphere [wikipedia.org]?
For comparison, the orbit time of Mercury is 88 days.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday December 22, @09:14PM
Much more likely to be tidal forces. If the star takes more than the 3 day orbit period to rotate then the tidal bulge from the planet will lag the planet and drag it backwards. Pretty much the opposite of the way the Earth is slowly throwing the Moon away.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday December 22, @09:54PM
Here I though they had found a portal to hell on the planet. Sad News. So mundane if it's just going to spiral into its star.