Extract from ABC News
Queensland astronomers have discovered a new planet, but it offers a welcome far too warm for any human visitors.
TOI-1431b — or MASCARA-5b — is about 490 light years away from earth and one of the hottest planets ever recorded, with temperatures high enough to vaporise most metals.
Daytime temperatures on the planet can reach 2,700 degrees Celsius, or 3,000K, and its nightside temperature of 2,300C is the second hottest ever measured.
Researchers at the University of Southern Queensland's Centre for Astrophysics in Toowoomba led the global team that made the discovery.
Astrophysicist Dr Brett Addison described it as "a hellish world".
“No life would be able to survive in its atmosphere," he said.
"This planet is a gas giant planet so it doesn't really have a solid surface like the terrestrial planets in the solar system.
Global effort
NASA's Training Exoplanet Survey Satellite first flagged TOI-1431b as a possible planet in late 2019.
Dr Addison said follow-up observations collected over several months with a Stellar Observation Network Group telescope in the Canary Islands — along with other telescopes around the world — helped him confirm the planet's existence.
"I could see the radio velocity orbits starting to become quite clear, showing the star wobbling back and forth," he said.
"I was super excited.”
The planet – outside our solar system – is roughly one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter and orbits around a very hot star approximately every two days.
It has a retrograde orbit, meaning it travels in the opposite direction to the rotation of its host star.
TOI-1431b is also known by researchers as MASCARA-5b, but Dr Addison said it had nothing to do with makeup.
"That stands for Multi-site All Sky Camera," he said.
"That name is based on the survey [that found the planet].
"Astronomers like to come up with cute acronyms for their telescopes and observatories."
One piece of the puzzle
Humans won't be setting foot on TOI-1431b anytime soon — or more likely ever.
Aside from the unbearable temperatures, its gas composition means it lacks a defined surface.
But Dr Addison said it was still a critical discovery as it would contribute to the global space community's understanding of planet formation and migration.
Professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California, Stephen Kane, said the research helped to place the solar system "in context".
"These kind of discoveries teach us a lot about the diversity of planetary systems and what kind of architectures can exist," he said.
"Finding more of these kinds of planets will give us more data with which to study these kind of phenomena and try to understand better how this kind of migration occurs."
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