Stampede2 supercomputer simulations help capture helium gas clouds escaping distant planet. A planet located approximately 950 light years from Earth could be the Looney Tunes’ Yosemite Sam equivalent of planets, blowing its atmospheric ‘top’ in spectacular fashion. Called HAT-P-32b, the planet
HAT-P-32b, an exoplanet 950 light years away, has a massive helium tail 53 times its size. Using advanced telescopes and supercomputers, scientists aim to understand atmospheric loss in ‘hot Jupiters’ and further explore distant worlds.A planet located approximately 950 light years from Earth could be theequivalent of planets, blowing its atmospheric ‘top’ in spectacular fashion.
The planet HAT-P-32b was discovered in 2011 using spectroscopic data from the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network. It’s known as a ‘hot,’ a gas giant similar to our neighboring planet Jupiter, but with a radius twice as large. This hot Jupiter hugs closely in orbit to its host star, about three percent the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Its orbital period — what we consider a year here on Earth — is only 2.
The light analyzed in the study comes from the star HAT-P-32 A. It’s slightly hotter and similar in size to our own sun. The analyzed light is not just straight starlight. As the planet passes in front of the star, for just a couple of hours the starlight gets filtered the most by the planet’s gassy atmosphere. This filtering, called absorption, reveals features of the transiting planet, in this case huge outflows of helium when the spectra were analyzed.
The models examined the interactions between the planetary outflow and stellar winds in the tidal gravitational field of the extrasolar system. The models showed columnar tails of planetary outflow both leading and trailing the planet along its orbital path with excess helium absorption even far from the transit points that matched observations. What is more, the models suggest complete loss of the atmosphere in about 4 x 10e10 Earth years.
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