{"id":212341,"date":"2025-04-24T13:33:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/bd05-4868-ab-a-planet-on-its-last-breath"},"modified":"2025-04-24T13:33:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T18:33:41","slug":"bd05-4868-ab-a-planet-on-its-last-breath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/bd05-4868-ab-a-planet-on-its-last-breath","title":{"rendered":"BD+05 4868 Ab: A Planet on Its Last Breath"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a very tiny object, with very weak gravity, so it easily loses a lot of mass, which then further weakens its gravity, so it loses even more mass,\u201d said Dr. Avi Shporer.<\/p>\n

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What can a planet that\u2019s shedding its material teach astronomers about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recently submitted study<\/a> to The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/em> hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated a unique exoplanet that orbits its host star approximately 20 times closer than Mercury orbits our Sun, resulting in the exoplanet shedding so much material that it\u2019s creating a tail of debris and will eventually disintegrate into nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to 9 million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet\u2019s entire orbit,\u201d said Dr. Marc Hon<\/a>, who is a postdoc in the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and lead author of the study.<\/p>\n

Exoplanet BD+054868Ab is located approximately 140 light-years from Earth and orbits its star in approximately 30.5 hours. For context, Mercury takes our Sun in 88 days. The orbit of BD+054868Ab is so close, astronomers hypothesize that it\u2019s a molten world slowly shedding its material and they estimate it will be completely gone between 1 million and 2 million years from now. During its long and slow death, BD+054868Ab is shedding so material that it\u2019s leaving a trail of debris in its wake, which initially puzzled astronomers after analyzing data obtained from NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis is a very tiny object, with very weak gravity, so it easily loses a lot of mass, which then further weakens its gravity, so it loses even more mass,\u201d said Dr. Avi Shporer. What can a planet that\u2019s shedding its material teach astronomers about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recently submitted [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212341","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\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}