One Year on This Giant, Blistering Hot Planet is Just 16 Hours Long

upstart writes:

One year on this giant, blistering hot planet is just 16 hours long:

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of light years from Earth. These extrasolar planets are a veritable menagerie, from rocky super-Earths and miniature Neptunes to colossal gas giants.

Among the more confounding planets discovered to date are "hot Jupiters" - massive balls of gas that are about the size of our own Jovian planet but that zing around their stars in less than 10 days, in contrast to Jupiter's plodding, 12-year orbit. Scientists have discovered about 400 hot Jupiters to date. But exactly how these weighty whirlers came to be remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in planetary science.

Now, astronomers have discovered one of the most extreme ultrahot Jupiters - a gas giant that is about five times Jupiter's mass and blitzes around its star in just 16 hours. The planet's orbit is the shortest of any known gas giant to date.

Due to its extremely tight orbit and proximity to its star, the planet's day side is estimated to be at around 3,500 Kelvin, or close to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit - about as hot as a small star. This makes the planet, designated TOI-2109b, the second hottest detected so far.

Judging from its properties, astronomers believe that TOI-2109b is in the process of "orbital decay," or spiraling into its star, like bathwater circling the drain. Its extremely short orbit is predicted to cause the planet to spiral toward its star faster than other hot Jupiters.

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