Astronomers detect first known ‘death wish’ planet
The outlook isn’t great for the exoplanet HIP 67522 b. Over the next 100 million years, powerful magnetic fields and destructive cosmic radiation will continue eating away at the distant planet, reducing it from its current Jupiter-sized mass down to a size resembling Neptune. But these apocalyptic conditions aren’t the fault of a nearby black hole. Instead, they’re a result of what astronomers describe as the exoplanet’s “clingy” relationship to its host star. “I have a million questions because this is a completely new phenomenon, so the details are still not clear,” Ekaterina Ilin, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), said in a statement. Long theorized but never observed, the first known “planet with a death wish” is described by Ilin and her colleagues in a study published July 2 in Nature. Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught a clingy exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares...