Humans have just marked the beginning of a new year here on Earth, but hundreds of light years away, a freshly discovered exoplanet celebrates the occasion every few days.
An astrophysicist from Toowoomba has unearthed a hot Jupiter exoplanet that experiences a very short year, orbiting its sun in less than a week.
Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star other than the Earth's sun, and giant gas exoplanets with scorching temperatures earn the term hot Jupiters.
Hot Jupiters have very short orbital periods and are very close to their host stars.
Jake Clark from the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) led the project which found TOI-778 b revolved around a rapidly spinning dwarf star, completing a full orbit in less than five days.
Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team worked from the university's observatory in Mount Kent south of Toowoomba.
The TESS was launched in 2018 and is the next step in the space agency's search for planets outside the solar system. It has already identified thousands of exoplanet candidates.
But it was not easy to find TOI-778 b.
Dr Clark led a team of 70 scientists from all over the world.
"We received a signal from the TESS telescope to say there could be a planet orbiting this star," he said.
"But as we took preliminary data, we noticed that the parent star was spinning super fast."
The planet was moving so fast, it was hard to confirm as the signals were smeared.
"NASA said, 'Hey look we think there might be a planet around this star, can you go and follow it up?' and then we used our observatory at Mount Kent, and we used our telescope there alongside telescopes in Chile and the US," Dr Clark said.
A 500-year delay
Dr Clark said while it might seem appealing to ring in the new year every five days years, the planet is not only extremely hot, but light years away.
"Because of that, the planet is exceedingly hot to the point where if you were in the clouds of the planet, it would actually be hot enough to melt silver," he said.
"It's over 530 light years away and so what that means is that the light is coming from the star, so we're seeing this planet go around the star.
"It's taken over 570 years for that light to get from that star to us so we've actually discovered this planet as it was 530 years ago.
"We're looking at it as it was back in the 1500s which is absolutely incredible."
He said researchers were aware of around 500 hot Jupiters in other planetary systems but none were known to exist in our solar system.
They are named after the planet Jupiter because of their size but can be found anywhere.
"Jupiter, just in context, is 11 times as wide as Earth is and Jupiter weighs about 330 times that of Earth," Dr Clark said.
"So Jupiter is a really, really big boy."
Significant discovery
While the team was still trying to work out how exoplanets such as TOI-778 b formed and how they developed close orbits, astrophysicist Benjamin Pope from the University of Queensland said it was a significant discovery.
"This is a great success from Jake and his team," Dr Pope said.
"So you actually have to confirm these planets with another method and so here's what these guys have been doing.
"They've followed it up ... using this ground-based telescope [at] Mount Kent, really, really well, really extensively."
He said the work with the TESS had accelerated exoplanet discovery.
"What's happening is technology is getting a lot better, the technology of the space telescopes is pushing to finding them further away," he said.
The director of the Centre for Astrophysics at USQ, Brad Carter, said it was exciting that planets could be discovered from regional Queensland.
"I'm very pleased that Mount Kent is fulfilling the expectation of being a powerhouse of exoplanet discoveries," he said.
"It's quite unusual for a regional university in Australia, to have such an output of science."
The Centre for Astrophysics at the USQ hopes to make even more discoveries this year.
"We're part of the much larger project these days called AI launch, which is about the USQ leading a big project with other universities and industry to develop rocket technology to develop capability for Australia to build and launch its own rockets, its own satellites, all that kind of thing," Professor Carter said.
"So we're part of a much bigger effort to develop Australia's sovereign space capabilities."
