Self-harming planet found, causes its own downfall

The European Space Agency's Cheops mission has discovered a self-destructive planet that causes its own ruin: it is called Hip 67522 b and it orbits so close to its parent star that it induces violent explosions of energy that end up damaging it by corroding its atmosphere. Described in an article in the journal Nature, it represents the first case of a planet that actively influences its star , and not the other way around as has always been thought. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in the 1990s, astronomers have wondered whether some of them could orbit close enough to disturb the magnetic field of their star and trigger flares. To answer this question, researchers led by Ekaterina Ilin of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy initially used NASA's TESS space telescope to identify stars with flares potentially triggered by planets. When they observed the young star Hip 67522 (which is only 17 million years old ) with its two planets in orbit, they immediately suspected that they had found something interesting : Hip 67522 b was in fact the youngest planet to orbit its parent star in less than ten days . To know for sure whether the observed flares were really triggered by the planet , the researchers decided to involve the Cheops space telescope, capable of observing individual stars with extreme precision. Cheops was able to detect other flares coming from the star (15 in total), while the planet was transiting in front of it . And the very fact that the flares are seen during the planetary transit , say the authors, suggests that they are caused by the planet itself. Hip 67522 b , 400 light-years from Earth, is a gas giant that is similar in size to Jupiter and has a density comparable to that of cotton candy , which makes it one of the most evanescent exoplanets ever discovered. Radiation from the star is eroding its thin atmosphere and causing it to lose mass much faster than expected. Over the next 100 million years , it could go from being a Jupiter-sized planet to a much smaller one the size or smaller of Neptune.