Failed star is a record-breaking ‘Jupiter’ hotter than the Sun

A newly-discovered "hot-Jupiter" has a surface temperature 2,000 degrees hotter than that of our Sun.

Artist's concept of what a brown dwarf will look like. (NASA/ESA/JPL)

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Hot Jupiters are curious cosmic bodies. They are kind of like our Jupiter but they orbit very close to their stars, sometimes completing an entire orbit in just weeks or even hours, meaning that they have extremely hot surface temperatures. A new hot Jupiter discovered by astronomers has a surface temperature 2,000 degrees hotter than that of our Sun.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, scientists write on the discovery of a system that consists of two bodies located about 1,400 light-years away. This system offers an unprecedented opportunity to study hot Jupiter atmospheres in particular while also helping advance our understanding of planetary and stellar evolution, according to the Weizmann Institute of Science.

“We’ve identified a star-orbiting hot Jupiter-like object that is the hottest ever found, about 2,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the Sun,” said lead author of the study Na’ama Hallakoun in a press statement. She explains that unlike other hot Jupiters, which are harder to study because of the glare from their host stars, this system has a star that is 10,000 times fainter than a normal one, making it a “perfect laboratory for future studies of hot Jupiters’ extreme conditions.”

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The system consists of two different kinds of “dwarfs.” One of the objects is a “white dwarf,” which is left of a Sun-like star after it runs out of fuel. The other object is a “brown dwarf,” which is much more massive than most planets but does not have enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion, turning it into a star.

Sometimes stars’ gravities can rip apart objects that come too close. But this brown dwarf is quite dense, with a mass of about 80 Jupiters squeezed into the size of, well, Jupiter. This lets it stay intact, forming a binary system with the white dwarf.

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astronomy