A joint international team led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States of America has discovered a planet that is so far the fastest among its peers to orbit its main star, which may contribute to advancing our understanding of the nature of planetary orbits.

To reach these results, this research team used the satellite to survey the exoplanets called "TESS" of the US Space and Aviation Agency (NASA), whose missions since launched in April 2018 have been to search for planets outside the solar system.

TESS is equipped with four wide-field binoculars, along with another set of precise detectors that give it the ability to scan an area of ​​the sky 400 times larger than its predecessor, "Kepler".

Data from TES is sent back to Earth every two weeks, and the new planet was discovered in May 2020.

extreme planet

According to the new study, published in The Astronomical Journal on November 23, the new planet is called TOI-2109b, located at a distance of about 855 light years. from Earth.

The new planet is also a giant in the category of hot Jupiters, which are about 400 planets so far, similar to Jupiter in their magnitude, or perhaps even larger, and unlike our Jupiter with high temperatures, this planet is five times larger than Jupiter.

According to the study, the most striking result was that of all these Jupiter-like planets, TOI-2109b orbited its star in just 16 hours at a phenomenal speed.

The researchers also found that this planet is located at a distance of only 2.25 million kilometers from its star.

Mercury, for example, is the closest planet to our Sun, about 46 million kilometers away at its closest.

For this reason, the daytime temperature on the newly discovered planet is about 3500 degrees Celsius, that is, in the heat of a small star, the distance between the planet and the star is not only the reason for this heat, but also because this star is one and a half times larger than our sun.

new scientific research

The researchers from this team believe that TOI-2109b, due to this extreme orbital extremity, is getting closer every day to its star, and may collide with it someday after about 10 million years.

The researchers hope that studying extreme planetary systems in this way will improve our understanding of the nature of the planets in the solar system, which will help us understand their past, and thus predict their future.

For example, before discovering Jupiter-like planets, scientists thought that they existed far from the stars, as in the case of Jupiter in our galaxy, but with time it was confirmed that these planets are located close to their stars, and from here the question arose about the secret in the different state of Jupiter from others like him. This has resulted in completely new and different theories looking at the origins of the solar system.