New Year's Day comes around every three days: astronomers have discovered planets with ultra-fast time
People are accustomed to thinking of a year as a period of 365 days, during which the Earth orbits the Sun. However, there are far more extreme examples in the universe where a planetary year lasts only a few days.
Recently, astronomers at the Greenhill Observatory on the island of Tasmania confirmed the existence of two unusual exoplanets with extremely fast orbital motion. These distant worlds complete a full orbit around their host stars in about three days, meaning that a new “year” there arrives faster than a typical weekend on Earth.
A Triumph for a Modest Observatory and NASA Data
The discovery was a true breakthrough for Australian researchers, who spent more than two years meticulously analyzing signals from NASA’s TESS space telescope. This instrument searches for distant worlds using the transit method, detecting the barely noticeable, regular dimming of starlight when a planet passes in front of its star.
Despite the relatively modest equipment at the Greenhill ground station, it was the calculations and observations by Tasmanian scientists that made it possible to turn theoretical suspicions into irrefutable astronomical facts and accurately calculate the orbital parameters.
Scorching Giants
The first confirmed giant was TOI-3053b—a classic “hot Jupiter” whose radius is more than 1.2 times that of the largest planet in our solar system. It races around an ancient star nearly eight billion years old, completing a full orbit in exactly three days.
The second object, TOI-3278b, which scientists have dubbed a “bloated Saturn,” looks even more bizarre. Although it is even larger than Jupiter in size, it turned out to be three times lighter: the intense heat of the star, around which the planet orbits in three and a quarter days, heats the atmosphere to extreme temperatures and literally expands the giant from the inside, turning it into a loose ball of gas.
Alongside them, researchers have also discovered a third candidate, whose planetary status is currently being verified, with an orbital period of about 3.14 days. Thomas Plunkett, the lead observer, emphasizes the uniqueness of the discovery: such extreme giants are an enormous rarity in the cosmos, as they form around less than one percent of all known stars.
This was reported with reference to astronomers at the Green Hill Observatory.
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