This planet is being eaten by its own star and at an insane rate

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have caught a young exoplanet in the midst of a destructive transformation. The young planet, named TOI 1227 b, is having its atmosphere torn away by a constant barrage of X-rays from its host star.

This intense radiation has caused the planet's atmosphere to swell, making it “puffed up” to the size of Jupiter, even though its mass is likely closer to Neptune's.

It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet. The planet’s atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star. — Attila Varga of the Rochester Institute of Technology, who led the study.

The planet is a mere 8 million years old, making it about 625 times younger than Earth and the second-youngest transiting planet ever observed. It orbits a red dwarf star about 330 light-years away at an extremely close distance — less than a fifth of Mercury's distance from our Sun. While its star is cooler than the Sun in visible light, it is fiercely bright in X-rays.

The research team calculated that the star's X-ray assault is stripping away a mass at approximately 1 trillion grams per second (10¹² g/s). “The future for this baby planet doesn’t look great,” said co-author Alexander Binks of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

The study predicts that within about a billion years, the planet will lose its atmosphere entirely. It will also shrink to about a tenth of its current size, transforming into a small, barren planet with no possibility of hosting life.