Astronomy Picture Of The Day: Meet the Lemon-Shaped Exoplanet: PSR J2322-2650b

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole@konstructivizm

Meet the Lemon-Shaped Exoplanet: PSR J2322-2650b NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has spotted one of the strangest worlds yet — a Jupiter-mass exoplanet stretched into a bizarre lemon shape by the crushing tidal forces of its host, a rapidly spinning pulsar (the dense remnant of a dead star).This oddball orbits just ~1 million miles from its pulsar — so close that its “year” lasts only 7.8 hours. The intense gravity has elongated it dramatically, making its equatorial diameter about 38% wider than its polar diameter.Its atmosphere is equally exotic: dominated by helium and carbon compounds (including C₂ and C₃), with soot-like clouds and almost no water, methane, or nitrogen as we’d expect. Under the extreme pressures deep inside, that carbon could be squeezing into diamonds — potentially creating “diamond rain” falling toward the core, similar to theories for ice giants like Neptune and Uranus.This world blurs the line between planet and something even weirder, challenging our models of how planets form and survive near pulsars. Its discovery highlights how wildly diverse exoplanets can be — from flattened, fast-spinning worlds to ones with chemistry we’ve never seen before.A glowing, distorted, possibly diamond-filled lemon hurtling around a cosmic lighthouse.