Imagine a unique celestial object appearing to be shedding tears. What comes to mind when you imagine this? While the average person might want to believe that the statement might be largely metaphorical, astronomers, especially from NASA, would beg to differ because of the discovery of a celestial lifeform in the form of a red planet that seems to defy all logic.
What has NASA recently found that is causing an uproar?
In the cosmos, whenever a planet orbits so close to its host star, there will be a great transfer of intense heat between the planet and its host star. This heat transfer forces the surface of the planet to become lava-like.
Since its inception, NASA has always had one mission in mind: to arm humanity with the knowledge and skills required to decrypt and understand the ancient signals and extraterrestrial formations occurring millions of miles deep into our star. To make significant discoveries such as this, sophisticated equipment that can handle the overpowering conditions of space was built from scratch. An example of such an advanced instrument is NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
When the red planet was discovered, several analyses needed to be carried out on it. This was because it possessed unique details that left NASA’s scientists in awe. The first noticeable detail was that it was constantly orbiting its sun every 30.5 hours. The temperature range around this occurrence is about 1,600 degrees Celsius. This type of temperature is the kind that is hot enough to melt rock and create an environment that is devoid of life.
Excerpts from planet BD+05 4868 Ab’s discovery
While NASA has pinpointed the location of this newly formed exoplanet, it was also observed that the planet was orbiting with a dusty trail stretching over 8.99 million kilometers into space. At first glance, astronomers concluded that comets were beaming from the red planet’s core, but with time and further investigation, it was later revealed that the red planet was vanishing in chunks. The seemingly long trail of dust that was visible in space was chunks of the planet getting disintegrated into smaller bits. The timeline for NASA’s newly found discovery was 1-2 million years. Although in planetary terms, this is nothing (just like this million-year-old historic discovery by NASA).
Why is the red planet (BD+05 4868) Ab vanishing with periodic consistency?
Scientists and astronomers have analyzed the situation and drawn up speculative reasons to explain why NASA’s new find is disintegrating in chunks:
Proximity to its star: In the science of astronomy. It is a well-known fact that a planet’s proximity to its star will affect the overall temperature of the planet. This relationship is expressly governed by the inverse square law.
Relentless heat and radiation pressure: This particularly disrupts the core of any planet. There is only so much heat that a planet can take before eventually disintegrating in real time. This heat scatters dust into orbit like smoke from a wildfire.
A rare opportunity in the universe’s history for humanity
For a long time, astronomers and astrophysicists have not been able to fully decipher the signatures left behind by rocky planets. The existence of the red planet (BD+05 4868 Ab) changes this perspective on a grand scale because, now, especially with the help of sophisticated spatial equipment like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers can actively watch a planet disintegrate in real time and study the process thoroughly for anomalies and aberrations.
It answers the curious question that has been plaguing every cosmological nerd’s mind: What will happen when a planet’s star gets too close to the surface of its host planet?
The beauty of astronomy lies in the concept of discovery. While otherworldly occurrences are happening within the fabric of our cosmos, NASA is bringing the majority of these occurrences to our notice, like the spotting of a planetary “war” on Jupiter. The “red planet” is offering humanity a chance to inspect and infer speculations about the existence of other rocky planets within our universe.