New Alien World Getting Destroyed By Parent Star

A newborn exoplanet is reportedly getting annihilated by its host star. According to a recent research, scientists have found that a hot Jupiter extra solar planet named PTFO8-8695b is being stripped of its gaseous atmosphere at an accelerated rate. The alien world is just 2 million years old, which makes it a baby in terms of planetary age.

The researching team of scientists found that the strong gravity of the new planet's host star was ripping away its outer layers. "We do not know the ultimate fate of this planet," said Christopher Johns-Krull, lead author from Houston's Rice University in Houston. "It likely formed farther away from the star and has migrated in to a point where it's being destroyed. We know there are close-orbiting planets around middle aged stars that are presumably in stable orbits. What we do not know is how quickly this young planet is going to lose its mass, and whether it will lose too much to survive."

The PTFO8-8695b is located in the constellation Orion around 1,100 light-years away from our planet. The hot Jupiter exoplanet, which completes an orbit of its sun in 11 hours, was first suggested as a planet candidate in 2012. Incidentally, hot Jupiter exoplanets have a mass similar to the biggest known planet in our solar system. The extra solar planet was discovered with the transit method that relies on the tiny dip in brightness on a host star to note that a planet is orbiting it. In addition, the scientists made a more detailed observation with the help of Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory telescope and Texas's McDonald Observatory.

On the basis of their study, the astronomers found that the PTFO8-8695 system was emitting high energy hydrogen. Furthermore the emissions from the new born planet, which has just 3 to 4 percent width of its host star, were almost as bright as its sun's emissions. The scientists pointed out that such a phenomenon could not be due to a feature prevalent on the parent star's surface, rather it strengthened the evidence for PTFO8-8695b being a bona fide exoplanet.