Astronomers find ultra-hot Jupiter near a dying star

An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a previously unknown exoplanet, designated NGTS-21b. It is an ultra-hot Jupiter.

A hot gas giant in the artist’s image. Source: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

NGTS-21b orbits an orange dwarf located at a distance of 2090 light-years from Earth. The star is 14% smaller and has 30% less mass than the Sun. It is also characterized by low metallicity.

As for NGTS-21b, the exoplanet is a gas giant. Its radius is 1.33 times, and its mass is 2.36 times the mass of Jupiter. The orbit of the exoplanet passes a distance of only 3.5 million km from the parent star. It makes one revolution around it in 37 hours. Due to this proximity, the atmosphere of NGTS-21b is heated to a temperature close to 1100°.

Another consequence of such proximity is “bloat”. The parameters of NGTS-21b indicate that under the influence of the powerful radiation of the star, it began to increase in size. This is especially true for systems that are at the end of their life path. And the age of NGTS-21 is just estimated at 10 billion years.

Recall that astronomers have recently registered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet the heaviest of all chemical elements found there so far.

According to https://phys.org

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