Surprise Discovery of Giant Helium Tails Around a Distant Planet

whole wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing a somewhat intriguing Discovery from one of the first planetary systems discovered by astronomers in the early 2000s a planetary system that you can kind of see right here visualized in space Engine with the planet somewhat similar to Jupiter or between extremely close to its parent star just to give you a better perspective here's

how close all of this is but what's intriguing about this planet or I guess what's intriguing about the recent discovery is the recent analysis of the unusual tale created by the planetary atmosphere as the result of various gases and specifically helium escaping from the surface and forming something absolutely extreme something that the scientists did not imagine and specifically the longest tidal tales ever seen around any

Planet anywhere and so in this video we're going to discuss what the scientist actually discovered how they found it but also why this is sort of exciting and somewhat unusual but first what exactly is this star system and what exactly is this planet in a sense this is what we refer to as the hot Jupiter a planet that's so much similar to Jupiter in size and

in Mass but that orbits extremely close to its parent star a star very similar to our sun known as hat p32 located at a distance of about 950 light years away from planet Earth and back in the early 2000s the scientists suspected that there might be a planet orbiting around the star because of initial observations from the Hungarian made automated telescope also known as hat the

project that started back in 1999 and was eventually joined by a lot of Institutions around the world in order to basically discover various potential exoplanets you can sort of see some of the initial telescopes used by this project in these pictures right here all of them were relatively simple and relied on somewhat simple setups and so around 2004 the scientists suspected that there was a planet

around this star because of unusual Jitters eventually firming hat p32b as a hot Jupiter approximately 0.9 Jupiter masses but about double the size or basically this was an inflated Jupiter also sometimes referred to as a poofy planet and though initially was assumed to be because of distances involved here it orbits around the star and just three percent of the distance of Earth to the Sun the

temperature alone unfortunately could not actually explain why this planet is so inflated here the temperature is about 1800 Kelvin which is just not hot enough to explain any of this as a matter of fact there are planets that are even hotter but are much smaller in size and this unusual phenomenon of inflated planets has been already observed around other planets like this one right here wasp

17b and so there must be something else happening here but it's currently unknown what nevertheless when this planet was originally found it was technically the largest by size ever seen and it took over a decade to find something even bigger but because this is such an extreme it it's actually one of the reasons it was discovered so quickly without using more advanced telescopes the final confirmation

for its existence was done by the now retired Spitzer Space Telescope but because this planet is also losing so much material over time the scientists identified a lot of intriguing molecules including molecules of water inside the atmosphere of this strange planet and all this was possible for one simple reason the orientation of the orbit of this planet is approximately 89 degrees or basically it orbits in

such a way that we can always see it fast in front of a star allowing the scientists to see some of the slight interact with the atmosphere of the planet but also obviously with its tail and so apart from the discovery of water they also started to find unusual detections of something else that was not inside the planet but around it now first of all they

were able to confirm that because of the size of this planet it's inflated so much that the outer parts of the atmosphere of this planet are now Beyond its Roche lobe in this case the lobe itself represents a region around the planet where the planet can still gravitationally hold the molecules from the atmosphere whereas Beyond this Loop the Gravity from the Star takes over and so

the molecules start orbiting around the star and eventually possibly even fall into it and so in this case a lot of the material is already past the lobe resulting in a huge loss of material that then creates this unusual tail moving away from the planet and possibly two directions and so in this case it doesn't actually resemble a typical Comet as much as forms what's known

as the tidal Tails likewise by observing the atmosphere as it passes in front of the star the scientists were also able to discover a cloud deck and a variety of different Haze that seems to form layers around this planet so basically here the atmosphere forms unusual layers around the planet with the planet itself potentially resembling something you've never even seen before or something we currently cannot

imagine but it turns out that this is just the beginning because the amount of gas that comes out from this planet is absolutely ridiculous it seems to lose about 14 tons of material every single second with the atmosphere leaking in several directions which as a result produces these double tails that seems to extend up to about 53 times the planetary radius forming the largest such structure

believed to be somewhat commentary in nature or a Twist resembling something from a typical Comet but the more exact calculations and observations suggest otherwise and here I think it's important to understand how the scientists discovered this and so once again it was because of the transits observable from planet Earth as the planet passes in front of a star here the scientists can observe various changes in

Starlight as it interacts with various gas and it just so happens that even before and after the transit some of the steroids seems to interact with some kind of a gas as you can see here for a period of about 12 hours in total and this implies a really large Cloud emitted from both directions from the planet in this case this was a cloud of helium

very likely coming from the planetary atmosphere and so by putting the data in a 3D modeling software the scientists were able to recreate something that looks like this and since there's no other explanation for this unusual chemical fingerprint at the moment it really looks like this planet is losing so much atmosphere the reforms this peculiar tidal Tails thick enough to dramatically dim the light from the

Star itself but since the gas in this case is very similar to the planet it's very unlikely to have come from somewhere else although obviously there's a lot of hydrogen here but that could have come somewhere else for sure but by having both hydrogen and helium present in vast amounts around the planet can only mean one thing the planet is basically evaporating but once again most

likely not because of the heat from the Star but very likely because it's so close to the star that it's now tightly disrupted and so this is really the result of tidal disruption not so much heat but even though it looks like this is a huge amount of stuff being lost according to the recent calculation it would still take this flat at nearly 40 billion years

to lose all of this completely and so this unusual planet is unlikely to evaporate anytime soon and will most likely exist for a very very long time doing the same depending on exactly what happens with this orbit in the future all the chances are the star itself might eventually swallow it over time so definitely quite an exciting star system but one question that we always had

and cannot answer yet is of course if something like this happened around the solar system sometime in the past some previous Studies have suggested that there was another planet in the star system and it might have even been a gas giant that was possibly swollen by the star and if so it means that it most likely emitted just as much gas and so the question here

is what exact effects all of this has on all of the other planets in this star system does it actually see the planets with a lot of other materials or does most of these gas just evaporate leaving the star system over time so definitely not something we can answer yet but something in future studies will probably tackle anyway until then check out some of the previous

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