Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted a planet so close to its star that it’s stretched into the shape of a lemon.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered an astonishing exoplanet that’s stretching our understanding of what’s possible for these distant worlds. And when we say say “stretch,” we mean it literally.
The roughly Jupiter-mass object, designated PSR J2322-2650b, orbits just one million miles away from its star, or one percent of the Earth’s distance from the Sun, with a single “year” lasting just 7.8 Earth hours. And at such proximity, the extreme gravity of the star — an exotic type known as a pulsar — pulls the entire planet into an oblong shape, like a lemon or a football.
The findings, published in a new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, are so unusual that the astronomers are having to consider if they represent an entirely new class of cosmic object.
“It’s the stretchiest planet that we’ve confirmed the stretchiness of,“ lead author Michael Zhang, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times.
The planet’s sun is a type of rapidly spinning neutron star. These are the almost impossibly dense stellar cores that are left over in the aftermath of a supernova, containing mass equal to our entire Sun in a package the size of a human city. (The resulting gravity is so extreme that if you could scoop just a tiny teaspoon of one of these objects without being instantly crushed into a soup of pure neutrons, which is what neutron stars are, it’d weigh trillions of pounds.
