A disintegrating planet orbits a giant star. “The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to 9 million kilometers long,” says Marc Hon, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. (Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT)
In a dramatic cosmic find, MIT astronomers have discovered a planet located about 140 light-years from Earth that is rapidly breaking apart. This extraordinary world, roughly the mass of Mercury, orbits its host star at a blistering pace—completing a full orbit every 30.5 hours—and is disintegrating under extreme heat.
A Hellish World in Decay
The newly discovered exoplanet orbits its star at a distance 20 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun. At such close range, the planet’s surface is likely a magma ocean, with temperatures so high that its rocky crust is vaporizing into space. As it races around its star, the intense radiation is causing it to shed massive amounts of surface material—effectively evaporating away over time.
Detected by NASA’s TESS Mission
The crumbling exoplanet was detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission led by MIT that scans nearby stars for periodic transits—dips in starlight that indicate a planet passing in front of its star. What caught the astronomers’ attention was a strange, flickering transit signal: the depth of the light dip varied with each orbit, suggesting that the planet is leaving a trail of dust and minerals as it disintegrates.
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Why This Discovery Matters
This rare observation offers a unique opportunity to study the final stages of a rocky planet’s life, shedding light on the evolution and death of close-in exoplanets. It also opens new questions about planetary composition and survival in extreme environments—vital for understanding the full range of planetary systems across the galaxy.
The scientists confirmed that the signal is of a tightly orbiting rocky planet that is trailing a long, comet-like tail of debris.
“The extent of the tail is gargantuan, stretching up to 9 million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet’s entire orbit,” says Marc Hon, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
It appears that the planet is disintegrating at a dramatic rate, shedding an amount of material equivalent to one Mount Everest each time it orbits its star. At this pace, given its small mass, the researchers predict that the planet may completely disintegrate in about 1 million to 2 million years.
“We got lucky with catching it exactly when it’s really going away,” says Avi Shporer, a collaborator on the discovery who is also at the TESS Science Office. “It’s like on its last breath.”
