Astronomers may have detected a planet around a nearby star 鈥� potentially the second hottest exoplanet ever found.
Spencer Hurt at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues used 10 years of observations of Vega, a bright star just 25 light years from our solar system, to look for the telltale gravitational tug of planets.
They were able to spot a potential world that orbits the star every 2.43 Earth days, at a distance 10 times closer than Mercury orbits the sun. It has a mass up to 20 times that of Earth, making it a so-called 鈥�hot Jupiter鈥�, but its close proximity coupled with the star鈥檚 brightness 鈥� almost 60 times the luminosity of our sun 鈥� would make it especially warm.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 not unusual to see hot Jupiters,鈥� says Samuel Quinn at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a co-author on the paper. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 unusual to see hot Jupiters as hot as this.鈥�
The planet would have an average temperature of about 3000掳C, although because it is orbiting at such a close distance, it would almost certainly be tidally locked to the star with one face in constant sunlight and thus much hotter than the other.
There is one known planet hotter even than this. KELT-9b, a hot Jupiter 650 light years away from Earth, is estimated to have a surface temperature of 4300掳C. Both KELT-9b and the new planet are hotter than most red dwarf stars 鈥� which are the most abundant class of star in our galaxy 鈥� according to the researchers
If the observations are confirmed, this would also be the first planet ever discovered in the Vega system. While there have been indirect suggestions of planets before in a debris disc that surrounds the star, none have been definitively detected 鈥� partly because the brightness of the star makes planet detection difficult.
鈥淸This] would be the first direct detection of a planet [in the system],鈥� says Hurt. Follow-up studies will be needed to confirm its existence. Other planets might exist orbiting at a greater distance from the star too.
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