Who says you can not lose your atmosphere by a red dwarf in the area and then a new growth using volcanic activity? Tits resilient planet, located 41 light-years from the earth, it seems to flourish again after a rough meeting with his host.
Exoplanet GJ 1132 b is similar to and very different from Earth. Of course it is several times wider than our planet, but both worlds share similar densities and atmospheric pressure, and both originated about 4.5 billion years ago. And like our planet, it started hot, with an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, and then gradually cooled.
However, the back stories of these two planets differ respectively.
While the earth has always been an earthy, rocky world, GJ 1132 b gave his life as a gaseous, Neptune-like planet. But as new research shows, a nearby red dwarf has wiped out its original hydrogen and helium-rich atmosphere with powerful radiation, so that GJ 1132 b, after being stripped to its rocky core, is now technically an earthly planet. The new article appears in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal, but a pre-print is available at the arXiv.
The authors of the article reached these conclusions based on direct observations of the exoplanet and theoretical modeling. The telescope selected was the Hubble Space Telescope, which enabled the team to detect the “secondary atmosphere”, which consists of molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane and an aerosol haze that looks like smog on Earth.
“This is very exciting because we believe that the atmosphere we are seeing now has regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere,” said Raissa Estrela, co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. in Southern California, explained in a statement. ‘At first we thought that these strongly irradiated planets could be quite boring because we believed they had lost their atmosphere. But we, along with Hubble, looked at the existing observations of this planet and said, ‘Oh no, there’s an atmosphere.’ ‘
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In terms of an explanation, the authors say that much of the planet’s current hydrogen has previously been retained and absorbed into the molten magma mantle. Volcanic processes are causing this stored hydrogen to now leak from below and replenish the new atmosphere, according to the research.
“This process works early in a planet’s life, when the star is warmer,” said JPL scientist Mark Swain. lead author of the study, in the NASA release. ‘Then the star cools down and the planet just sits there. So you have this mechanism to cook the atmosphere in the first 100 million years, and then it’s going right. And if you can evoke the atmosphere, you can retain it. ‘
GJ 1132 b, which takes only 1.5 days to make a complete orbit of its hungry host, is likely prone to tidal warming, in which gravitational forces plunder the planet from within. The exoplanet, despite its short years, is in an elliptical orbit, leading to an effect known as ‘gravity pump’. While GJ 1132 b swings back and forth, it alternates between bumping and stretching actions, producing an engine that drives the tidal forces. and, in turn the retention of a liquid mantle.
The surface of this exoplanet is probably not very thick, maybe only a few hundred feet deep, according to the authors. The terrain is probably fairly flat, with cracks caused by the tidal pumping operations, from which the hydrogen gradually leaks out.
The new study has implications for studying similar worlds elsewhere in the galaxy.
“The detection of an atmosphere on this rocky planet increases the possibility that the numerous strongly irradiated Super-Earth planets, presumably the vaporized core of Sub-Neptunes, can house observable atmospheres under favorable conditions,” the authors write in the study.
The big question now is, how often does this happen? Is it just a freak appearance? That can be answered by the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which with its infrared capabilities will be able to easily spot planets like this. What’s more, JWST can also be used to study GJ 1132 b and provide new data to confirm it results.