Among the more perplexing planets identified to date are “hot Jupiters,” which are giant balls of gas around the size of our own Jovian planet yet orbit their stars in less than 10 days, as opposed to Jupiter’s plodding 12-year orbit. To present, scientists have discovered approximately 400 hot Jupiters. But how these massive whirlers came to be is one of the greatest unanswered puzzles in planetary science.

Astronomers have discovered one of the most extreme ultrahot Jupiters — a gas giant approximately five times the mass of Jupiter that whizzes around its star in just 16 hours. The planet has the shortest orbit of any known gas giant.

The planet’s day side is projected to be roughly 3,500 Kelvin, or close to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, due to its incredibly tight orbit and proximity to its star – about as hot as a tiny star. This places the planet, designated TOI-2109b, as the second hottest yet discovered

Astronomers believe TOI-2109b is in the midst of “orbital decay,” or spiralling into its star, similar to bathwater circling the drain. Because of its extremely short orbit, the planet is expected to spiral faster into its star than other hot Jupiters.

The discovery, made originally by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led project, provides astronomers with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate how planets behave as they are dragged in and consumed by their star

“If we’re lucky, we might be able to detect how the planet travels closer to its star in one or two years,” says main author Ian Wong, who was a postdoc at MIT during the work and has since gone to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “We shall not see the planet plunge into its star in our lifetime.” But in another 10 million years, this planet might not exist.”

The discovery was published today in the Astronomical Journal and was the result of a large cooperation that involved members of MIT’s TESS science team as well as experts from around the world.

Transit track

On May 13, 2020, NASA’s TESS satellite began monitoring TOI-2109, a star in the southern Hercules constellation around 855 light years from Earth. The star was designated as the 2,109th “TESS Object of Interest” by the mission due to the likelihood of an orbiting planet.

The spacecraft recorded measurements of the star’s light for over a month, which the TESS science team then studied for transits — periodic dips in starlight that may suggest a planet passing in front of and briefly blocking a small part of the star’s light. TESS data indicated that the star does, in fact, host an object that transits every 16 hours.

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