Exoplanet is hotter than some stars

Just 25 light years away, a team led by Spencer Hurt of the University of Colorado at Boulder has seen an exoplanet of extremes: the warm Jupiter orbits its star once every 2.43 days, between Mercury and Sun is ten times more than distance, Hurt writes an article in a paper published. The mass of the celestial body is about twenty times that of the Earth.

The brightness of its star is 60 times stronger than that of our Sun. Combined with close proximity, extreme conditions are likely to prevail over the regular celestial body in the Vega system. The average temperature of the planet can be up to 3000 ° C, and it revolves around its star in a bounded manner: so it always points to the same side of the star, so that even higher temperatures prevail here.

So far, astronomers have known only one exoplanet with high temperatures: the Celt-9B, which is 650 light years away from us and has warmed to 4300 ° C. Both exoplanets are warmer than red dwarfs, the most common class of stars in our galaxy.

If the observation is confirmed, this would be the first evidence of an exoplanet in the Vega system. The brightness of the star makes the search difficult here.