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Newly found planets are 'roasted remains'

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Abraxas
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« on: December 22, 2011, 08:03:33 am »

"In the process, their volatile layers have probably been evaporated or pulled away by the friction.

"At the same time, the envelope of the star may have expanded further and accelerated its rotation due to this inward motion of the planets.

"Then, the system may have stabilised into a common envelope configuration, where the planets settle on stable orbits inside the red giant," he told BBC News.

"The red giant envelope was ultimately expelled almost completely due to increased mass loss, leading to the formation of the hot subdwarf B star that we have observed."
Graphic showing evolution of a star

The discovery was made while the scientists were engaged in asteroseismology - the practice of studying a star's pulsations to gauge its inner structure. It is akin to seismology which studies the interior of the Earth from the oscillations in rock generated by earthquakes.

But as they were doing this, Charpinet and colleagues noticed a characteristic dip in the light coming from KIC 05807616 every 5.76 and 8.23 hours - the result of two objects passing in front of the star as viewed from Kepler.

What seems remarkable is that the planets were not completely destroyed in the process of engulfment. But Dr Charpinet said that the large iron cores of giant planets could resist the environment for millions of years.

"Iron is certainly much harder to evaporate than the gaseous or liquid layers made of volatile elements that make the large envelopes of giant planets," he explained.

"Moreover the dense cores are quite tightly bound by their own gravity. Then, it will take more time to completely evaporate them.

"In fact our discovery suggests that such cores could survive long enough throughout the red giant phase and later on around a very hot star."

On Tuesday, a separate team announced that they had used Kepler to detect planets with diameters just 87% and 103% of that of the Earth. These go into the record books as the first true Earth-size planets found outside our Solar System.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16279016
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