Who says you can’t miss the atmosphere in front of a nearby red dwarf and then grow a new one with the help of volcanic activity? Tits resistant planet, located at 41 lighta few years from Earth, it seems to be thriving again after a hard encounter with his host star.
Exoplanet GJ 1132 b is similar and very different from Earth. Sure, it’s several times wider than our planet, but both worlds they share similar densities and atmospheric pressures, and both appeared about 4.5 billion years ago. And like our planet, it started hot, with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, and then gradually cooled.
However, the later stories of these two planets are different.
While the Earth has always been a terrestrial, rocky world, GJ 1132 b began its life as a gas, Neptune-like planet. But, as new research shows, a nearby red dwarf removed its original atmosphere rich in hydrogen and helium with powerful radiation, so that GJ 1132 b, after being stripped to its rocky core, is now technically a terrestrial planet. The new article will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal, but in prepress is available in the archive.
The authors of the article reached these conclusions based on direct observations of the exoplanet and theoretical modeling. The telescope chosen was the Hubble Space Telescope, which allowed the team to detect the “secondary atmosphere,” which consists of molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and an aerosol mist that resembles smog on Earth.
“It’s super exciting because we think the atmosphere we see now has regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere,” said Raissa Estrela, co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. in Southern California, he explained in statement. “We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be quite boring because we think they were losing their atmosphere. But we looked at existing observations about this planet with Hubble and said, ‘Oh, no, there’s an atmosphere.’ “
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In terms of explanation, the authors say much of the planet’s current hydrogen was conserved earlier, as it had been absorbed into the mantle of molten magma. According to research, volcanic processes now cause the release of this stored hydrogen from below and feed the new atmosphere.
“This process works early in life on a planet, when the star is hotter,” said Mark Swain, a JPL scientist. lead author of the study, in the NASA version. “Then the star cools down and the planet is just sitting there. So you have this mechanism where you can cook the atmosphere for the first 100 million years and then things settle down. And if you can regenerate the atmosphere, maybe you can keep it ”.
GJ 1132 b, which takes just 1.5 days to make a full orbit of its famous host star, is likely prone to warming up, in which gravitational forces shake the planet from within. The exoplanet, despite its short year, is in an elliptical orbit, giving rise to an effect known as “gravitational pumping” As the GJ 1132 b rotates back and forth, alternating stretching and stretching actions, producing an engine that drives the tidal forces. i, in turn, the preservation of a liquid mantle.
The surface of this exoplanet is probably not very thick, maybe only a few hundred feet deep, according to the authors. The terrain is likely to be fairly flat, with cracks caused by tidal pumping actions, from which hydrogen constantly escapes.
The new study has implications for the study of similar worlds located elsewhere in the galaxy.
“The detection of an atmosphere on this rocky planet raises the possibility that the many powerfully irradiated planets of Super-Earth, believed to be the evaporated nuclei of Sub-Neptunes, may, under favorable circumstances, house detectable atmospheres.” the authors write while studying.
The big question now is: how often does this happen? It’s just one occurrence freak? That could be answered with the upcoming James Webb space telescope, which, with its infrared capabilities, should be able to detect planets like this easily. In addition, JWST could also be used to study GJ 1132 b and provide new data to assert them results.