{"id":463310,"date":"2025-12-22T01:08:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T01:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/463310\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T01:08:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T01:08:12","slug":"james-webb-discovers-planet-shaped-like-lemon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/463310\/","title":{"rendered":"James Webb Discovers Planet Shaped Like Lemon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\"Astronomers<\/p>\n

\t\t\tNASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)<\/p>\n

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> have discovered an astonishing exoplanet that\u2019s stretching our understanding of what\u2019s possible for these distant worlds. And when we say say \u201cstretch,\u201d we mean it literally.<\/p>\n

The roughly Jupiter-mass object, designated PSR J2322-2650b, orbits just one million miles away from its star, or one percent of the Earth\u2019s distance from the Sun, with a single \u201cyear\u201d lasting just 7.8 Earth hours. And at such proximity, the extreme gravity of the star \u2014 an exotic type known as a pulsar \u2014 pulls the entire planet into an oblong shape, like a lemon or a football.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The findings, published in a new study<\/a> in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, are so unusual that the astronomers are having to consider if they represent an entirely new class of cosmic object.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the stretchiest planet that we\u2019ve confirmed the stretchiness of,\u201c<\/strong> lead author Michael Zhang, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The planet\u2019s sun is a type of rapidly spinning neutron star. These are the almost impossibly dense stellar cores that are left over in the aftermath of a supernova, containing mass equal to our entire Sun in a package the size of a human city. (The resulting gravity is so extreme that if you could scoop just a tiny teaspoon of one of these objects without being instantly crushed into a soup of pure neutrons, which is what neutron stars are, it\u2019d weigh trillions of pounds.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of these neutron stars spin, becoming pulsars, and emit a sweeping beam of energy along its poles like a lighthouse, appearing to telescopes as a repeating signal.But since it emits mostly in gamma rays, it also means its light is invisible to telescopes like the James Webb, which see in infrared wavelengths. This provides a perfect opportunity to study an exoplanet, which are often outshined by the light of their star.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all,\u201d coauthor Maya Beleznay, a physicist at Stanford University, said in a NASA statement<\/a>. \u201cSo we get a really pristine spectrum. And we can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their observations revealed that just as unusual as the planet\u2019s lemon shape is the composition of its atmosphere. With surface temperatures up to 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014which is four times hotter than Venus, the hottest world in the solar system \u2014 it\u2019s almost entirely dominated by helium and carbon, something that\u2019s never been seen before on any planet. That\u2019s because molecular carbon easily binds with other elements commonly found on planets and especially gas giants, such as oxygen and nitrogen, suggesting that these elements must not be present.<\/p>\n

With a weird composition comes deeply peculiar weather. The astronomers speculate that clouds of carbon soot float through the air. Near the core of the planet, these clouds can condense into shards of solid diamond.<\/p>\n

As it stands, everything about PSR J2322-2650b is an enigma. Few pulsars are known to have a planet, let alone one that\u2019s shaped like a lemon, has graphite for clouds, and lacks the elements detected on other worlds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One possibility is that this configuration is actually a type of star system known as a black widow binary, in which the pulsar slowly siphons material from a smaller stellar object in its orbit, sucking the life out of it until it\u2019s devoured completely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this has only been observed between a pulsar and another star, not a planet. That raises the possibility that the exoplanet is actually some kind of stellar remnant that\u2019s already been whittled away at for eons. \u201cIt would have lost 99.9 percent of its mass, and we just happened to catch it right at the very end,\u201d coauthor Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington told the NYT.<\/p>\n

The more exciting alternative is that we\u2019re witnessing an \u201centirely new type of object that we don\u2019t have a name for,\u201d Zhang suggested to the paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cDid this thing form like a normal planet? No, because the composition is entirely different. Did it form by stripping the outside of a star, like \u2018normal\u2019 black widow systems are formed? Probably not, because nuclear physics does not make pure carbon,\u201d Zhang elaborated, via NASA. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to imagine how you get this extremely carbon-enriched composition. It seems to rule out every known formation mechanism.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on space:<\/strong> Scientists Detect Huge Rotating Structure in Space<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered an astonishing exoplanet…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":463311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-463310","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115760549314638018","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}