The first super-Earth we encountered in space was not a very pleasant place to live. But we sensed it almost immediately: “55 Cancri e” had eight times the mass of Earth, its “coldest” side had temperatures of 1,127 degrees, and it was so close to its star that it made a complete revolution around it every 17 hours. ..
What we didn’t find out quickly, or in the next 20 years, is what the hell was going on with the very strange signals it was sending out. Now we have an idea.
A special sign? And so much. Mainly because of my boss. Sometimes the planet sends a strong signal and other times it just doesn’t. And to make things even more complicated, this only happened when we were talking about visible light. For example, this doesn’t happen with infrared light: the planet just changes the intensity.
The question during these decades was obvious: What was going on there?
Idea. Now, the Astrophysical Journal Letters has just accepted a paper that presents a solution to this puzzle. A solution closely related to the proximity of the planet to the star.
According to the researchers, it is possible that this proximity causes the star to release gases. We’re talking the whole apocalypse: massive volcanic eruptions, continent-sized thermal vents, and geological catastrophe of this style. The planet is so hot it could literally boil.
This would feed its atmosphere with carbon-rich elements, but of course, exposed to the recurring fury of its star, the atmosphere cannot last long. The gases that surround the planet remain at zero from time to time.
Lack of balance. But the key point is that these are not well-balanced processes: since both processes (those that add gases to the atmosphere and those that destroy it) have large components of chance, it depends on who “wins”… that’s how we end up at planet..
This would explain the signals, according to the researchers. In its atmosphere-free phase, the planet cannot emit visible signals from it because it does not exist (but the surface is hot enough that infrared signals can still be emitted). When there is an atmosphere, we have visible light, yes; But because this atmosphere would heat the surface even more, the infrared signals would be stronger.
Oh well, mystery solved… Not so fast. The truth is that the work is very reasonable and a perfect fit, but it is only a hypothesis. Fortunately, we have a tool that we didn’t have just a few years ago: James Webb. With it we could easily measure the pressure and temperature of the atmosphere and in this way verify whether it is true that the atmosphere is disappearing.
We just have to be able to do it. It never hurts to retire a 20 year old mystery.
In Xataka | A planet that’s more habitable than Earth (or so we think)
Image | NASA/JPL-Caltech
