Newly discovered exoplanet ‘hot Jupiter’ celebrates New Year every 5 days

Still suffering from New Year’s drunkenness? How about doing it all again in less than a week? If you lived on a newly discovered exoplanet, that’s exactly what you’d need to do: Astronomers have detected a planet three times the size of Jupiter orbiting a fast-spinning dwarf star, about 530 light-years from Earth. sun in seven days!

This newly discovered exoplanet, designated TOI-778 b, is an example of a so-called “hot Jupiter”, similar to the gas giant Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, but very close to its star. This proximity creates extreme conditions, such as surface temperatures high enough to evaporate iron and orbits shorter than ten Earth days.

This hot Jupiter orbits its star TOI-778 about 5.6 million miles (9 million kilometers) away. This is much closer to the Sun than even Mercury, our Solar System’s inner planet, which is about 29 million miles (46 million km) from our star.

The exoplanet TOI-778 b has a radius of 1.4 times that of Jupiter and is about 2.8 times heavier than the gas giant. TOI-778 b orbits its host every 4.6 days and has an estimated surface temperature of approximately 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 Kelvin or 1,227 degrees Celsius).

The planet’s parent star dwarfs our own Sun, about 71% larger and 40% heavier than our star. The TOI-778 is also a high-speed spinner that spins at around 90,000 miles per hour (40 kilometers per second). The 1.95 billion-year-old star is less than half the age of our 4.6 billion-year-old Sun, with an estimated surface temperature of 11,600–11,780 degrees Fahrenheit (6,700–6,800 K).