The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a nearby planet’s atmosphere being blasted away by energetic outbursts from its star, CNN reported.
The red dwarf star, called AU Microscopii, or AU Mic, is located outside of our solar system, 32 light-years from Earth, which is relatively close. It’s home to one of the youngest planetary systems ever observed, and the star is less than 100 million years old, as per CNN.
NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite discovered the system during observations in 2020. A slight dip in the star’s brightness revealed the presence of a gaseous world orbiting in front of it.
When the Hubble Space Telescope observed one orbit of the exoplanet, which takes 8.46 days, everything seemed normal. Then, the telescope revisited the system for another look a year and a half later. Astronomers were surprised to see that AU Mic b, the closest planet to the star, is bearing the brunt of the star’s radiation, which is evaporating the planet’s hydrogen atmosphere. There are at least two known exoplanets in the system, and more may await discovery, according to CNN.
The latest findings are part of a study that has been accepted for publication in a future edition of The Astronomical Journal.
The study’s author, Keighley Rockcliffe who is a doctoral candidate in physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, said: “We’ve never seen atmospheric escape go from completely not detectable to very detectable over such a short period when a planet passes in front of its star. We were really expecting something very predictable, repeatable. But it turned out to be weird. When I first saw this, I thought ‘That can’t be right.’"
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