LONDON & NEW YORK & HONG KONG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 15, 2023--

Scientists have found a new planet they shouldn’t exist, after it seemed to miraculously survived the violent death of its star. Many planets, including our own, face almost certain doom when their stars reach the end of their lives and engulf them. When our own Sun dies, for instance, it will expand to 100 times and swallow the Earth. But the new study offers hope that at least some of those planets are able to survive. The newly discovered world, a Jupiter-like planet known as Halla, managed to survive the demise of its star Baekdu, in what should have been certain death. Astronomers found the planet and discovered through follow-up observations that Baekdu had previously expanded into a red giant. When it did, it would have inflated up to 1.5 times the distance between it and Halla, engulfing the star, and then shrunk back down to its current size. Despite that dramatic and violent event, Halla has managed to persist, sticking around so that astronomers could see it using telescopes in Hawaii. “Planetary engulfment has catastrophic consequences for either the planet or the star itself - or both. The fact that Halla has managed to persist in the immediate vicinity of a giant star that would have otherwise engulfed it highlights the planet as an extraordinary survivor,” said Marc Hon, the lead author of the study. The findings are published in a new paper, ‘A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star’, in the journal Nature today. Halla was found in 2015, using what scientists call the “radial velocity method”, which monitors how stars move and uses that to understand how they might be tugged around by the planets that orbit them. In the years since, scientists found that the planet must have been engulfed by the star, and conducted follow-up observations to better understand the planet. Those observations confirm that the planet had been in its stable orbit for over a decade, and that it really existed. “Together, these observations confirmed the existence of the planet, leaving us with the compelling question of how the planet actually survived,” said IfA astronomer Daniel Huber, second author of the study. But scientists still do not know how it survived. One possibility is that it started on a larger orbit before moving closer to its star, but astronomers believe that is unlikely. Another is that Baekdu was actually once two stars. They may have merged during their death, sparing Halla from being merged at all, by stopping them getting big enough to engulf it. And a separate possibility is that Halla was actually born out of the collision of the two stars. That might have produced a gas cloud that actually gave birth to Halla, and so it may be the result of the demise of its star rather than a survivor of it. Read More Nasa rover spots bizarre donut shaped rock on Mars Strange alien planet could be trapped in edge of the Solar System SpaceX Starship completes six-engine static test fire at base in Texas

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX appears to have ditched YouTube for hosting live streams of its rocket launches in favour of the tech billionaire’s own digital media platform X. The latest SpaceX launch, which saw the private space firm break the record for the most number of launches in a single year, was not broadcast on YouTube over the weekend, despite the two previous launches receiving more than 100,000 views on the Google-owned platform. Instead it appeared exclusively on X, formerly known as Twitter, where it received just over 200,000 views. A clip of the liftoff that appeared shortly after garnered more than 4.3 million views. Coverage of SpaceX’s recent Crew-6 splashdown appeared on YouTube, though only through Nasa’s official channel due to the US space agency’s involvement in the mission. It had initially been scheduled to also stream on SpaceX’s official YouTube page, however the page was quietly removed in the build up to the event. SpaceX has around 6.5 million subscribers on YouTube but more than 31 million followers on X. It is not clear whether this is a permanent transition to host SpaceX videos exclusively on platforms owned by Mr Musk, or if content will return to YouTube in the future. The Independent has reached out to SpaceX for comment. Mr Musk has previously abandoned other social media platforms, deleting the official Facebook pages of both SpaceX and Tesla in 2018 during the #deletefacebook movement that arose in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “Literally never seen it even once,” he wrote on Twitter at the time. “Will be gone soon.” Both pages had more than 2.5 million followers before they were taken down. The Musk-led companies continue to have a presence on Instagram, which is also owned by Meta and run by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. Read More SpaceX smashes rocket launch record as Musk eyes historic Starship mission

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