{"id":153851,"date":"2022-12-29T17:22:19","date_gmt":"2022-12-29T23:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/astronomers-find-a-star-pulling-its-giant-exoplanet-into-a-death-spiral"},"modified":"2022-12-29T17:22:19","modified_gmt":"2022-12-29T23:22:19","slug":"astronomers-find-a-star-pulling-its-giant-exoplanet-into-a-death-spiral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/astronomers-find-a-star-pulling-its-giant-exoplanet-into-a-death-spiral","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers find a star pulling its giant exoplanet into a death spiral"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-find-a-star-pulling-its-giant-exoplanet-into-a-death-spiral2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kepler-1658b\u2019s orbit is getting a little shorter \u2014 and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star \u2014 every year.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation \u2014 first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018 \u2014 to notice the slow shrinking of Kepler-1658b\u2019s orbit. Recognizing the signs of deadly orbital decay in other exoplanets is going to take a similar amount of time and a similar volume of data, but Vissapragada and his colleagues say they\u2019re getting there.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe should begin to see hints of orbital decay for these planets within the next decade,\u201d he and his colleagues write in their recent paper.<\/p>\n<p>As for Kepler-1658b, it\u2019s got about 2.5 million years left. When the time comes, whoever is watching (from whatever alien world harbors astronomers in the distant future) won\u2019t see the planet simply fall into the star\u2019s outer layers and burn up, like a meteor falling into Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Instead, the same tidal forces that sealed its fate will probably rip the planet apart shortly before it takes the final plunge. Something similar probably happened to long-dead moons of planets like Saturn, which now make up parts of the planet\u2019s famous ring system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kepler-1658b\u2019s orbit is getting a little shorter \u2014 and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star \u2014 every year. Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation \u2014 first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153851\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}