Astronomy Swiss space telescope discovers "suicidal" planets
Astronomers have discovered a "suicidal" planet using the Swiss Cheops space telescope. The exoplanet, named HIP 67522 b, triggers solar flares that are so strong that they damage it.
02.07.2025, 17:00
SDA
The strong rays literally blow away the planet's atmosphere, causing it to shrink year after year, as the European Space Agency (Esa) announced on Wednesday. In the next 100 million years, it could shrink from the size of Jupiter to that of Neptune. It is the first evidence of a "planet with a death wish". The researchers have published their results in the journal Nature.
Such eruptions can also occur on our star, the sun, when the sun's magnetic field twists. Large amounts of radiation and charged particles are sometimes hurled into space. When these particles hit the Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere, they can produce auroras.
Very young star
However, the researchers have now shown for the first time that a planet itself can trigger such flares, as the eruptions are known in technical jargon.
Astronomers have suspected since the 1990s that some planets could orbit so close to their parent stars that they could disturb their magnetic fields and thus trigger flares.
The planet HIP 67522 b offered the perfect conditions for this: it is very close to its star. It only needs seven days to orbit it once. In addition, the star it orbits is very young - just 17 million years old. By comparison, our sun is around 265 times as old at 4.5 billion years. The younger a star, the more energy and magnetic activity it has.
Although such effects were theoretically suspected, the current observations were surprising: According to Esa, the so-called flares observed during this research are 100 times more energetic than expected.
The researchers are now planning to observe other similar star-planet systems to find out whether this behavior occurs more frequently.
The research was carried out as part of Cheops' "Guest Observers" program. Researchers who are not part of the Cheops science team were given time to carry out their observations with the telescope.
