Astronomers have launched a new program known as ATREIDES to study a mysterious "desert" in space. But unlike the deserts of the planet Arrakis conquered by Paul Atreides in the "Dune" novels by Frank Hebert, this desert describes an absence of planets with masses up to around 20 times the mass of Earth that orbit close to their stars, planets scientists refer to as "hot Neptunes."
The first planets studied by the ATREIDES program, the two worlds of the TOI-421 system, demonstrate misaligned orbits, hinting that this system experienced a more chaotic evolution than our solar system. Studying it could help astronomers figure out why these "hot Neptunes" appear to be so rare in the cosmos, as well as teach us about how planets form elsewhere in the universe.
