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Friday, January 6, 2023

Kepler's First Planet Will Soon Be Eaten

Soon being a relative term, of course, this is still astronomy. 

The Kepler Space Telescope did a lot of great work in the hunt for exoplanets over its 10-year lifespan; no other telescope has been so prolific in that field. Kepler alone is responsible for discovering over 2,500 exoplanets. One of those planets had to come first though, and that planet is Kepler 1658b, a so-called Hot Jupiter that orbits its star in just 3 days. (If you're wondering why it's not called Kepler 1b, the planet was initially dismissed as a false alarm until its existence was confirmed in 2019, 10 years after the initial discovery.)

Unfortunately, it's also dying. Kepler 1658b is spiraling in toward its star, with its orbit shortening by 130 milliseconds every year; in just 2.5 million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, it will be swallowed up. Obviously, a couple million years is a long time. If you scale the planet's life down to a more human life span, however, it's only got a month or so to live. That's not so long. So, if we ever want to visit an utterly inhospitable, searing-hot gas giant, we'd better get a move-on with the whole interstellar travel thing.

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