A massive “hot Jupiter” planet has made a peculiar appearance before American observatories, featuring unusual tails, with the main tail being 53 times the planet’s radius.
Hot Jupiters are a class of gas giant planets similar to Jupiter in the Solar System but orbit much closer to their parent stars, making them hot instead of cold like their distant cousin.
Known as HAT-P-32b, the hot Jupiter mentioned above is releasing virtual gas tails into space. A recent study suggests that it is self-“shedding” its own atmosphere.
Planet HAT-P-32b possesses a massive gas tail – Image: M. Macleod
Scientists utilized data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope located at the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin and ran 3D simulations on the Stampede2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to model the planet’s atmospheric flow.
“What we found is a massive helium gas tail that’s closely tied to this planet, 53 times the radius of the planet, formed by gas escaping from the planet,” said TS Zhoujian Zhang from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the lead author of the study recently published in the journal Science Advances.
According to SciTech Daily, there are other, fainter tails in the data, which might be older helium flows.
The most supported hypothesis regarding the formation of these peculiar tails is that the planet is in the process of losing its atmosphere, continuously releasing helium from its atmosphere into space.
This has been an ongoing mystery in the “Hai Wang Xing Desert” region of star systems, which consists of planets with average mass and short orbital periods.
The model also reveals intriguing interactions of the planet with its parent star, a sun-like star, as well as the thickness of its atmosphere, so thick that it has to eject tails for… another 400 billion years before it could run out of “fuel.”