LONDON: Researchers have ready some exciting discoveries about the exoplanets, accessible away from the limitations of our solar scheme. For the first time the magnetic field power of one of the exoplanets have been resolute, which might cover the way for estimating the force of other ones as well. The development of a planet is mostly dependent on its magnetic field. To reach the conclusion, scientists have analyzed the extremely fast winds from the star of that planet, which slam against the planet. The study has been published in the journal Science.
Kristina Kislyakova the lead author of the study and a scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz suggested “it works as a shield against stellar wind particles, which erode the atmosphere, so it is important to know if this field is big or small.” For deducing the magnetic field of the exoplanet, HD 209458b, orbiting around a sun-like star in the constellation Pegasus, was investigated by Kislyakova and her colleagues. The planet is about 40 percent wider than Jupiter with a mass of about 70 percent of it.
HD 209458b is a gas giant and the distance of its orbit from its star is lesser than the Mercury and Sun. On comparing with that of the Earth, its distance is less than one-twentieth from that between Sun and Earth. Owing to its proximity with its star, the atmosphere of HD 209458b blows away due to heat, forming a comet-like tail.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was used by the researchers for analyzing the spectrum of light from HD 209458b and according to the data obtained, hydrogen atoms were found to be migrating away rapidly from the exoplanet in a lopsided manner. For the explanation of the unusual blowing off hydrogen from HD 209458b, a 3-D model was built by the scientists, which included the known interactions between planetary atmospheres and stellar winds along with the flow of particles that stream off stars. As per the model, the magnetic field of the exoplanet has been calculated to be about 10 percent of the strength of Jupiter. The stellar wind was found to be blowing at about 895,000 mph.
