Soon-to-be-Destroyed Planets Found Close to Their Stars

Three planets are discovered in distant star systems, and all of them are close to spiraling in toward their destruction, one in less than a million years.

IMAGE: An artist’s rendition of what a planetary system similar to TOI-2337b, TOI-4329b, and TOI-2669b might look like, where a hot Jupiter-like exoplanet orbits an evolved, dying star. CREDIT: Karen Teramura / University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy

Announced at last week’s AAS press conferences was the discovery of three planets that are teetering on the brink of destruction because they are orbiting dangerously close to their parent stars. One of these planets, TOI-2337b, has less than a million years to survive, making it the most endangered known planet.

The threatened planets were found in NASA TESS image data from 2018 and 2019. Follow-up observations were performed using a spectrometer at the Keck Observatory in Hawai’i to confirm the planets.

In a paper accepted to The Astronomical Journal, researchers presented detailed estimates of the planets’ masses and sizes, with mass ranges of 0.5 to 1.7 times Jupiter’s mass and size ranges from just less than Jupiter’s size to 1.6 times its size. Basically, a bunch of Jupiters, really. Gas giants everywhere!

Densities for the planets range from styrofoam-like to about three times as dense as water, which means these planets have different origin stories across the board. That’s pretty cool and kind of frustrating…