“This exoplanet takes less than a day to go around its star and its shape is more similar to that of a rugby ball than a sphere,” they point out.
An international team of scientists has observed for the first time how an exoplanet has been deformed by the force of its host star, an effect known as ‘rugby ball’ which, until now, astronomers had only theorized.
The results of this work, in which researchers from the Center for Astrobiology (CAB) have participated, are published today in the revista Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The data, provided by the CHEOPS mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), reveal that the exoplanet WASP-103b has been warped by powerful tidal forces between the planet and its host star, WASP-103, hotter and larger than our Sun.
“This exoplanet takes less than a day to go around its star and its shape is more similar to that of a rugby ball than to that of a sphere”, says Jorge Lillo-Box, researcher at the Center for Astrobiology and co-author of the study.
Similar phenomenon on Earth
The phenomenon is not strange. On Earth, for example, the tides of the oceans are produced, a result of the influence of the Moon that ‘pulls’ slightly on our planet as it orbits us.
The Sun also has a small but significant effect on the tides, but it is too far from Earth to cause large deformations.
In this case, the The star around which the exoplanet revolves, called WASP103, in the constellation Hercules, has a similar temperature and is about 1.7 times larger than our Sun.
The exoplanet, WASP-103b, is a gas giant planet almost twice the size of Jupiter and 1.5 times its mass and its extreme closeness to its host star could cause gigantic tides, something that until now could not be confirmed.
Using new data from ESA’s Cheops Space Telescope, combined with data obtained from the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, The astronomical community has been able to detect how tidal forces deform the exoplanet WASP-103b, giving it an oval shape.
These data have been complemented with high spatial resolution images from the AstraLux instrument at the Calar Alto Observatory (AlmerÃa), thanks to which the origin of the signal has been confirmed.
Cheops measures the transits of exoplanets, that is, the changes in light that occur when a planet passes in front of its star, but on this occasion, its high precision has allowed it to detect the tiny signal that indicates that WASP-103b is undergoing a deformation. caused by tidal forces.
The Cheops data have also made it possible to derive a parameter called the Love number, which measures how mass is distributed within a planet, which can give information about its internal structure and materials and determine in what proportion it can be rocky, gaseous or liquid.
“Understanding this internal structure is essential to understand the processes of formation and evolution of planetary systems”, points out Jorge Lillo-Box.
The Love number of the exoplanet WASP-103b is similar to that of Jupiter, suggesting that the internal structure could be similar, despite the fact that WASP-103b has twice the radius.
This is because it is ‘inflated’, probably from the heat emanating from its host star and other mechanisms. that in the future can be studied with the James Webb Telescope, the largest space observatory history that will help to find out much more about the internal structure and nucleus of exoplanets and, therefore, about their formation.
The study also notes that The orbital period of WASP-103b could be increasing and that the planet is slowly moving away from the star, which would indicate that, along with tidal forces, there is another factor influencing the planet but more observations will be needed to find out why this is happening. (I)
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