New Planet


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Billions of years before the Sun was born, the Milky Way galaxy flicked out its gravitational tongue and slurped down a tiny neighboring galaxy that had ventured too close. The evidence for that ancient act of cosmic cannibalism is the still-digesting remains of the meal: a handful of relatively nearby stars known as the Helmi Stream, whose weird orbits ? above and below the plain of the galaxy ? are a tip-off to their weird origin.

Now one of those stars has a second claim to fame. HIP 13044, as it's unglamorously known, has a planet whirling around it ? the first planet ever found from outside the Milky Way. Aside from its extra-galactic origin, the planet itself, found with a medium-size telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and described in a new paper in Science, isn't especially remarkable.

It's a bit bigger than Jupiter and orbits its parent star in about 16 days ? a "year" so short it would once have been considered impossible for so giant a planet, until multiple discoveries of many similar worlds proved such a revolution rate to be pretty common.

It's the star itself that makes the discovery of a planet surprising, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, its age ? perhaps 7 or 8 billion years ? means that while HIP 13044 was once much like the Sun, it's gone through a dramatic change of life.

As it burned through its supply of hydrogen, the star would have swelled to become a so-called red giant, tens, or even hundreds of times its original size. When that happens to our Sun billions of years from now, Earth will probably be destroyed.

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How would that affect life, orbiting that fast ... ?

actually how would that affect the planet itself, all the centrifugal forces and the size ... its much bigger than earth, yet its orbit is much smaller , wouldnt the side facing the star be pulled much harder by gravity than the side facing away from it, just by being so much closer to the star? as in, the planet is essentially being pulled apart?

"Either they were incredibly lucky," says Eric Ford, a planet searcher at the University of Florida, "or planets aren't uncommon around stars like these."

the best sentence in the whole article

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