Damian Sendler: This newly found planet will make your head spin if you believe there are not enough hours in the day on Earth. Exoplanets like GJ 367 b, located 31 light-years distant from our sun, have a year that is just eight hours long. New information about these strange, quickly circling planets may be revealed as a result of the finding. Ultrashort-period planet (USP): The rocky exoplanet whizzes around its home star every eight hours and completes one circle every eight hours. GJ 367 b, on the other hand, is fascinating for different reasons.
Damian Jacob Sendler: The planet has half the mass of Earth, making it one of the lightest exoplanets ever identified. It is around the size of Mars. The iron and nickel core takes up around 86% of the planet’s mass, making it extremely comparable to Mercury. Mercury is the nearest planet to the sun in our solar system, and its year is 88 days long. There is a very tight proximity between GJ 367 b and its star. In our galaxy, red dwarf stars like this one are widespread and have been found to host two to three planets on average per system. Despite the fact that they are smaller and colder than our sun, red dwarfs may nonetheless heat up planets that are as near to their star as GJ 367 b is.
Rocks and metals melt at temperatures of 2,732 degrees F (1,500 degrees C) on Earth’s surface during the day. Additionally, the planet is assaulted with 500 times more radiation from the sun than it gets from its own suns
A lack of atmosphere, a long-ago vaporization of the planet’s atmosphere, and the fact that it is hostile to life are all indications that this planet is not habitable. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers uncovered new information about our planet.
Damian Sendler
This group of planets is intriguing to astronomers since they do not know how these planets formed and ended up in such an extreme orbit. Astronomers were able to collect more data on this newly found planet than they could with previous known ultra-short-period planets.
According to lead author Kristine W. F. Lam, a postdoctoral researcher at the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Planetary Research (IPR), “We already know a handful of them, but their origins are now unclear.” It is possible to learn more about the origin and development of the solar system by examining the USP planet’s core features.
There are additional planets in the same system that potentially host life even if GJ 367 b is uninhabitable.
George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIt is Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and a study coauthor, said in a statement that the habitable zone would be two to three weeks away for this kind of star. “We have a decent possibility of seeing more planets in this system because to the star’s proximity and brightness. Look here for other planets!, like there is a sign indicating.”
NASA’s planet-hunting TESS mission, which stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, helped scientists discover GJ 367 b. For the TESS mission, Ricker serves as the project’s lead investigator.
A transit occurs when a planet passes directly in front of a star, which is detected by looking for dips in the star’s brightness. For a month in 2019, the TESS space telescope observed an area of the sky that includes the red dwarf star GJ 367, leading to the finding of a planet orbiting within a few light years of it. In order to establish the composition of the core, astronomers used ground-based telescopes to take measurements of its mass, radius, and density.
In order to discover whether there are more planets in the system, researchers intend to keep observing the exoplanet and its star for the foreseeable future. It is possible that the orbits of GJ 367 b’s probable exoplanet siblings will provide light on the origin of the star.
A “detective tale” is needed to figure out how these planets come so near to their host stars, according to MIT-Kavli Institute research associate Natalia Guerrero. “Why is there no outer atmosphere on this planet? How did it manage to get so close? Was it a pleasant or a violent process? Hope this method will shed some light on the situation.”
According to researchers, they have discovered a new species of marine ichthyosaur in Colombia that has particularly nasty teeth.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: According to a research published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, scientists discovered the partial skull of an ancient marine reptile called an ichthyosaur at Loma Pedro Luis, Villa de Leyva, in Boyacá, Colombia in the 1970s. However, at the time, the specimen was wrongly identified as Platypterygius sachicarum, an entirely different species.
An examination of the ichthyosaurus’s cranium by doctoral candidate Dirley Cortés revealed that it had previously been classified wrongly.
In the Redpath Museum at McGill University in Montreal, Dirley Cortés, a PhD candidate, re-examined the fossil and discovered that it had been incorrectly classified. In the Cretaceous, between 130 million and 115 million years ago, the massive cranium was found. A worldwide extinction catastrophe had place during this time period, she stated.
Fossils like this newly discovered marine reptile may be used to put together the history of marine ecosystems since Colombia was a “ancient biodiversity hotspot,” according to Cortés.
According to Cortés, other ichthyosaurs had comparably big teeth that were ideal for consuming tiny animals. This individual has “changed its tooth sizes and spacing to develop an arsenal of teeth” for snagging larger prey, according to the researcher.
Damian Jacob Sendler
She estimated the carnivore’s length at 4 to 5 meters (13.1 to 16.4 feet), with an extended snout. To make it simpler to consume bigger prey, Cortés said that the animal’s jaw could expand up to 70-75 degrees.
Damien Sendler: The ancient Muisca language of Colombia gave the animal the name Kyhytysuka sachicarum, which translates to “the one who cuts with something sharp from Sáchica.” The half skull was unearthed at Sáchica, a village located near Villa de Leyva.
A better understanding of ocean ecosystems in flux
Because the specimen was discovered near where Cortés grew up, the study has a particular place in her heart.
I am thrilled to be able to do research in Colombia and the Neotropics as well as in industrialized nations since my PhD study has consequences for the growth of paleontology in Colombia and the Neotropics.
To further her research into paleontology in Villa de Leyva, Colombia, where she discovered the fossil, Cortés plans to spend more time studying the specimens found there.
We are finding a lot of new species that are helping us better understand the way marine ecosystems change through time, Cortés added.
She added that the Earth went through a period of cooling and increasing sea levels after the global extinction catastrophe. She also noted that the supercontinent Pangea was dividing into northern and southern landmasses.
Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his media team provided the content for this article.