Using the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) ground-based search tool for the extrasolar worlds, installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in northern Chile, astronomers have discovered a unique impossible exoplanet NGTS-4b that is comparable in size to Neptune, but it still has not lost its dense atmosphere.

This planet is a real toughie. It is located in the zone where it is expected that worlds the size of Neptune cannot survive.

-Richard West, lead author of the study from the University of Warwick (United Kingdom)

Neptune Desert is a region near the stars, where previously no planet has been found that is comparable in size to our eponymous ice giant. Worlds located in this zone receive the strongest radiation from the star and, as models predict, they cannot keep their atmosphere, which simply evaporates. As a result, only a stony core remains from the planet.

However, the newly discovered NGTS-4b, which is 20% smaller than Neptune, 20 times more massive than our planet, makes one revolution around its star in just 1.3 Earth days and is heated to more than a thousand degrees Celsius, still holding its gas envelope . At the same time, its star, which is 920 light-years away from Earth, is only slightly inferior in its characteristics to the Sun.

Researchers believe that NGTS-4b, which received the informal name impossible planet, is an outcast, and more recently (within the last million years) has moved into the Neptune desert under the influence of its neighbors. On the other hand, this red-hot world could initially be just much larger, and its atmosphere still evaporates.

Usually, when searching for extrasolar planets from the ground, telescopes are able to notice transits at a depth of at least 1%, but the NGTS tools raised this bar to an astonishing 0.2%. Now we are collecting new data to find out if there are similar worlds in the Neptune desert, perhaps, before we simply did not notice them. It looks like the desert is greener than is commonly believed.

-Richard West

Opened a unique exoplanet in the Neptune Desert
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