Discovery Alert: Flaring Star, Toasted Planet
A giant planet at around 400 light years, the hip 67522 B, so closely orbit its parent star that it seems to cause frequent rockets of the surface of the star, heating and swelling the atmosphere of the planet.
On the planet Earth, the “space time” caused by solar eruptions could disrupt radio communications, or even damage satellites. But the atmosphere of the earth protects us from the truly harmful effects, and we orbit the sun at a respectable distance, out of reach of the rockets themselves.
This is not the case for Planet Hip 67522 b. A gas giant in a young star system – aged only 17 million years – the planet only takes seven days to finish an orbit around its star. A “year”, in other words, hardly lasts as long as a week on earth. This places the planet dangerously near the star. Worse still, the star is of a type known for getting worse – especially in their youth.
In this case, the proximity of the planet seems to lead to a fairly frequent torchage.
The star and the planet form a powerful but probably destructive link. In a way that is not yet fully understood, the planet clings to the magnetic field of the star, triggering lighting rockets on the surface of the star; The energy of the cervical boost on the planet. Combined with other high -energy radiation from the star, the heating induces by the thrusts seems to have increased the already steep inflation of the planet’s atmosphere, giving the hip 67522 BA in diameter comparable to our own Jupiter planet despite only 5% of the mass of Jupiter.
This could well mean that the planet will not stay in the Jupiter size range for a long time. An effect of being continuously struck by intense radiation could be a loss of atmosphere over time. In 100 million years, this could reduce the planet to the status of a “hot neptune” or, with a more radical loss of atmosphere, even a “sub-neptune”, a type of planet smaller than Neptune which is common in our galaxy but missing in our solar system.
Four hundred light years are far too far away to capture images of stellar rockets striking in orbit of the planets. So how did a scientific team led by the Netherlands astronomer Ekaterina Ilin discovered that this happened? They used spatial original telescopes, NASA Tess (Exoplanet Transiting exoplanet survey satellite) and the cheops of the European space agency (characterizing the exoplanets telescope), to follow the enlightening rockets on the star and also to trace the path of the orbit of the planet.
The two telescopes use the “transit” method to determine the diameter of a planet and the time required to orbit its star. Transit is a kind of mini-eclipse. While the planet crosses the face of the star, it causes a small drop in the light of the stars reaching the telescope. But the same observation method also picks up sudden brightness of the star – stellar lighting rockets. By combining these observations over five years and applying a rigorous statistical analysis, the scientific team revealed that the planet is zapped with six times more rockets than it would be without this magnetic connection.
A team of scientists from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, led by Ekaterina ILIN of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, published its article on the Planet-Star Connection, “Planet, relatives induces eruptions on its star host”, in the Journal Nature on July 2, 2025.
