Astronomers have discovered a miracle planet that they say shouldn't even exist anymore, and it's blowing their minds.
. Not only is the planet situated at just half the Earth-Sun distance from its star, but its star also appears to have already moved beyond a phase that should have caused it to expand and destroy the planet. Yet somehow, 8 Ursae Minoris b continues to exist, defying all logical explanations and leaving astronomers baffled., there are few possible explanations here, though none of them are very believable.
Astronomers first discovered this exoplanet that shouldn’t exist using the radial velocity method. This method watches for changes in the light from a star to try to determine if a planet is orbiting it. This tugging creates a bit of a blue shift in the light when the planet pulls the star towards Earth, and the red shift it pulled away. It’s hard to estimate exactly how big planets are, though, because they never fully pull the blue shift towards Earth.
One possible explanation is that 8 Ursae Minoris b is so much more massive than its star — that it’s big enough to survive being enveloped by the star. However, there’s only about an eight percent chance of that being the case. The most likely explanation, they say, is that the planet started out orbiting a pair of stars, and that the current star stripped the other of its atmosphere, keeping it from eating the planet away.
It’s still unconfirmed, but if this explanation does prove truthful, it creates even more mysteries for astronomers to decipher throughout our universe. Our
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