Heavy-metal alien planet may be shaped like a football [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Charles Q. Choi - Live Science Contributor 10 hours ago



An artist's depiction of a distorted exoplanet.
(Image: © NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI))

An exoplanet may be shaped like an American football due to the mighty gravitational forces it experiences close to its star, a new study finds.

Scientists investigated KOI 1843.03, an exoplanet candidate that scientists need further observations to say for sure is real. This world putatively orbits a red dwarf star with slightly less than half the mass of our sun and is located about 395 light-years from Earth. Previous research found KOI 1843.03 was about 44% Earth's mass and 60% Earth's diameter.

Prior work suggested KOI 1843.03 orbited its star more closely than any other planet known yet. "Whizzing around its star in only 4.245 hours, a 'year' for this planet is just over one-sixth of a day on Earth," Leslie Rogers, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the new research, told Space.com.

In previous work focused on KOI 1843.03, Rogers and her colleagues analyzed potential consequences of the powerful gravitational forces the planet likely experiences from its close-in orbit. (Those forces are essentially an extraordinarily strong version of the tidal forces Earth experiences from the moon.) In that work, the scientists suggested that the exoplanet must be made primarily of iron to avoid getting ripped apart. Whereas Earth is about 32% iron, they estimated KOI 1843.03 was likely 66% iron.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/cannonball-exoplanet-may-be-stretched-football.html