{"id":296691,"date":"2025-07-02T23:51:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T23:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newhampshiredigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/02\/astronomers-found-the-most-self-destructive-planet-in-the-sky\/"},"modified":"2025-07-02T23:51:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T23:51:02","slug":"astronomers-found-the-most-self-destructive-planet-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newhampshiredigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/02\/astronomers-found-the-most-self-destructive-planet-in-the-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Found the Most Self-Destructive Planet in the Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Astronomers Found the Most Self-Destructive Planet in the Sky<\/p>\n

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This planet triggers flares on its star\u2014spelling its ultimate doom<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By Jacek Krywko<\/a> edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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In this artist\u2019s impression, the planet HIP 67522 b sends a wave of energy along magnetic field lines toward the surface of its host star\u2014triggering a massive flare when the energy reaches the star\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Stars often whip their planets with solar winds and radiation<\/a>, pull them ever closer with gravity and sear them with heat. But a newfound planet exerts an unexpectedly strong\u2014and ultimately self-destructive\u2014influence on its star in return.<\/p>\n

The star HIP 67522 is slightly larger than our sun and shines roughly 408 light-years away in the Scorpius-Centaurus star cluster<\/a>. It\u2019s 17 million years old, a youngster by stellar standards, and has two orbiting planets that are even younger. The innermost of these two planets, a Jupiter-size gas giant called HIP 67522 b, orbits HIP 67522 at a distance of less than 12 times the star\u2019s radius\u2014almost seven times closer than Mercury\u2019s distance from the sun in our Solar System. This in-your-face proximity, combined with HIP 67522\u2019s volatile teenage nature, has created a spectacle astronomers have never seen before: a planet that triggers powerful flares on the surface of its host star<\/a>, leading to the planet\u2019s own slow destruction.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a way, we got lucky,\u201d says Ekaterina Ilin, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), who led the study on the HIP 67522 system, published on Wednesday in Nature<\/i>. \u201cWe took all the star-planet systems that we knew of and just went ahead looking for flares\u2014sudden intense bursts of radiation coming from the star\u2019s surface.\u201d Parsing through the data gathered by two space-based telescopes, NASA\u2019s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the European Space Agency\u2019s CHEOPS (Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite), Ilin\u2019s team noticed that HIP 67522\u2019s flares seemed to be synchronized with its closest planet\u2019s orbital period. And those flares were gigantic\u2014\u201cthousands of times more energetic than anything the sun can produce,\u201d Ilin says.<\/p>\n\n

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The planet HIP 67522 b suffers severe consequences from flares on its host star: the high-energy radiation blasts atmosphere off of the low-density planet, threatening to eventually bring it down from a Jupiter-size world to a Neptune-size one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Janine Fohlmeister\/Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The orbiting gas giant likely sparks these powerful flares by perturbing the star\u2019s strong magnetic field lines as it passes by in its orbit. This sends waves of energy downward along the lines\u2014and when those waves meet the star\u2019s surface, a flare bursts out. The star\u2019s magnetic loops are \u201calmost like a spring waiting to be let go,\u201d Ilin says. \u201cThe planet\u2019s just giving it this last push.\u201d Based on the team\u2019s observations, HIP 67522 b triggers a flare once every Earth day or two.<\/p>\n

And this action has severe consequences for the planet itself: Ilin estimates the unlucky gas giant gets six times more radiation than it would if it wasn\u2019t triggering flares and blasting away its own atmosphere. At this pace, Ilin\u2019s team says, HIP 67522 b will shrink from Jupiter\u2019s size to Neptune\u2019s in about 100 million years. \u201cFlaring might cut the lifetime of the planet\u2019s atmosphere in half,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Researchers had suspected this type of star-planet interplay might occur, but they had never previously seen it, says Antoine Strugarek, an astrophysicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission\u2019s (CEA\u2019s) center CEA Paris-Saclay, who was not involved in the new study. \u201cThis is the first time we see very convincing evidence such interaction has been actually detected,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Ilin says it\u2019s too early to draw far-reaching conclusions from this first example of the phenomenon. As a next step, she says, researchers can compare HIP 67522 b with the other planet in the system, which orbits a bit farther from the star, to calculate how much mass the more closely orbiting world is actually losing through this process compared with the more distant one, which is likely only hit with random flares.<\/p>\n

Another unanswered question is exactly how the flare triggering works. \u201cIs it a wave [of magnetic energy] that propagates from the planet?\u201d Ilin wonders. She suggests that what happens could be similar to an effect that has been seen on the sun: smaller solar flares sometimes perturb nearby magnetic loops and tip them over the edge to snap and produce a larger flare.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most important question is how common the newly observed phenomenon is. For now, Ilin wants to focus on finding more systems where planets induce stellar flares that scientists can study. \u201cOnce we figure out how it works, we can turn it into a planet-detection technique,\u201d she says. Instead of searching for the planets themselves, researchers could look for stars that flare following a certain pattern\u2014suggesting they, too, might have planets with a self-destructive bent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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