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Artistic design 51 Pegasi b. Credit – NASA
Nobody awards the worst planet in the galaxy, and at best it would be a dubious honor. Somewhere out there may be other garden planets like Earth. Even somewhere, worlds like Mars can almost be missing. And somewhere there are planets like 51 Pegasi b, which if they didn’t win a nod to the worst planet, they would definitely enter the medal.
51 Pegasi b, located about 50 light-years from Earth, is a gas giant like Jupiter with a mass about 150 times that of Earth and orbits its host star at a distance of only 7 million km (4.3 million me). Turning so close, 51 Pegasi b has an estimated surface temperature of 1,000 ° C (1,800 ° F). It is also occasionally blocked, which means that one side is always facing this solar oven.
But 51 Pegasi b is more than just a balloon of superheated gas. It is actually one of the most important planets ever discovered, so important that in 2019 the astronomers who found it were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Because? Because despite its flaws, it was the first planet to be discovered outside our solar system and orbiting the main star in the sequence like the sun. With that, a series of exoplanets was born.
51 Pegasi b was discovered on 6 October 1995, and 25 years later the number of exoplanets has increased enormously. According to the latest report, there are 4,354 known exoplanets, including 712 multi-planet systems, for a total of 3,218 solar systems outside our own. Virtually every one of the hundreds of trillions of stars in the universe is considered a refuge in at least one world, and many of them host entire litters. The Earth, which once stood at the center of the human map of the cosmos, is now known to be an incredibly small part of an incredibly large planetary census.
Astronomers did not directly notice 55 Pegasi b – it is not possible to view the planet in the glow of its parent star from a distance of 50 light-years, as can be seen a pier flying by the street lamps from half a dozen blocks away. Instead, investigators used the radial velocity method, which consists of observing the slight gravitational wobble that the planet causes in its star in its orbit. It is a practical method of discovering planets, but it is slow because only one star can be observed at a time.
With the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers switched to a technique capable of capturing an entire web of worlds simultaneously. This method, known as the transit method, involves finding the slight attenuation of light that occurs when the planet passes through the Earth side of its parent star. The greater the obscuration, the larger the planet’s diameter. The more often the darkening occurs, the faster the planet orbits. Kepler and its subsequent observatory, the Exoplanet Transit Satellite (TESS), seek to unblock entire parts of the sky at once and observe thousands of potential transits for astronomers to study.
The transit method has brought far more promising worlds than the 55 Pegasi b. There is Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-like planet only 4.2 light-years away, orbiting its star in the Goldilocks zone, where temperatures are barely enough for water to exist. liquid. There’s Ross 128 b, another world the size of Earth, just 11 light-years away, where surface temperatures are estimated to be around a pleasant 23 ° C (73 ° F). There is a Trappist-1 solar system, just 39 light-years away, and it is home to at least seven Earth-like worlds, of which at least six could orbit in Goldilocks.
25 years, in which we have gone from knowing other exoplanets to identifying thousands of them (and we are sure about trillions more), is a long time compared to human life expectancy. It is difficult to blink on the cosmological time scale. But in this moment, our understanding of our place in the universe has changed forever. The earth may seem far less strange than it did when it was one of eight known planets. But it is a home for the wisest and humblest Gentiles for the knowledge it has acquired.
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