WASHINGTON: Astronomers have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dispersing from a warm Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby star by using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around any exoplanet, researchers said.
The cloud of hydrogen has been dubbed as “The Behemoth” bleeding. The hydrogen is evaporating from the planet because of the extreme radiation from the star.
Given this planet’s small size, it may offer clues to how hot super-Earths – massive, rocky, hot versions of Earth – are born around other stars through the evaporation of their outer layers of hydrogen.
“This cloud is very spectacular, though the evaporation rate does not threaten the planet right now,” said the study’s leader, David Ehrenreich from the Observatory of the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
“But we know that in the past, the star, which is a faint red dwarf, was more active. This means that the planet evaporated faster during its first billion years of existence. Overall, we estimate that it may have lost up to 10 per cent of its atmosphere,” said Ehrenreich.
The planet, named Gliese 436 b (GJ 436b), is considered to be a “warm Neptune,” because of its size and it is much closer to its star than Neptune is to our Sun.
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