Young Exoplanet Spotted Shedding Atmosphere Under Stellar Radiation

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, together with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, has revealed a “baby” exoplanet rapidly losing its atmosphere. The planet, named TOI 1227 b, orbits a faint red dwarf star and is only about 8 million years old. Powerful X-ray blasts from the star are stripping away the planet's thick gas envelope. Models indicate TOI 1227 b is shedding an amount of gas equal to Earth's entire atmosphere every ~200 years. The team notes the planet's atmosphere “simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it's receiving”. This finding offers a rare, real-time look at atmospheric erosion, showing how a young world can be dramatically reshaped by its star early on.

Observations of an Eroding Planet

According to the study, astronomers used Chandra's X-ray data (and earlier Hubble observations of the planet's transit) to study TOI 1227 b. This Jupiter-sized world orbits extremely close to its star – much closer than Mercury is to the Sun – and is about a thousand times younger than Earth. The host star is unleashing intense X-rays on the planet.

In artist's illustrations and models, this appears as a blue tail of gas streaming off TOI 1227 b as its atmosphere is ripped away. Computer simulations show the radiation will “rapidly” strip off the gas. Remarkably, the planet is already losing the equivalent of an Earth's atmosphere about every 200 years. If conditions persist, TOI 1227 b could ultimately shrink from a gas giant to “a small, barren world”.

Implications for Planetary Evolution

This discovery highlights the key role of stellar radiation in young planetary systems. High-energy X-rays (and ultraviolet light) from an active young star can heat and blow away a planet's atmosphere. As co-author of the study Joel Kastner explains, understanding exoplanets requires that scientists “account for high-energy radiation like X-rays”. In this case, the star's output acts like “a hair dryer on an ice cube,” gradually blowing the gas off the planet. Such photoevaporation is thought to explain why many intermediate-size exoplanets end up smaller or stripped to their cores.

Comments

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

Search This Blog