Today, especially thanks to new technologies that are beginning to become real tools for astrologers and astronomers around the world, a huge number of planets are being discovered, each one with its peculiarities that make them unique and interesting and that require a large number of hours of study.
Precisely and due to the great work that requires understanding all the peculiarities that each of these planets can present, the vast majority are discovered, baptized and, unless they attract attention for some specific reason, they are usually forgotten until a team has enough time to begin a study on their own characteristics.
KELT-9b, a gas giant with iron and steel particles in its atmosphere
In this arduous work today we have to talk about a pose known as KELT-9b, the same as just entered the list of most interesting exoplanets discovered to date and not precisely because it can be habitable, on the contrary, but because it is the hottest that has been discovered to date by astronomers, a temperature that, as the title of this entry says, is much higher than you can To imagine.
Going into a little more detail, KELT-9b literally stands out for having such a high temperature that it is the first time that astronomers have observed free atoms of iron and titanium in its atmosphere. To help you position yourself a little better, we talk about a planet whose temperature would be over 4.300 degrees Celsius, something that is simply impressive, especially if we consider that our own Sun has an internal temperature of 6.000 degrees Celsius.
KELT-9b orbits the star KELT-9, located 620 light years from Earth
Due precisely to such an extremely high temperature, as expected, we talk about the fact that KELT-9b is nothing more than one of the so-called gas giants and the fact that the temperature of the planet has become a subject of study is due precisely to the relationship you have with your star.
In this sense we have to reveal that KELT-9b orbits the star HD 195686, more commonly known as KELT-9. This star is located about 620 light years from our planet and is literally twice the mass of our Sun. As for KELT-9b, this planet, despite the fact that astronomers have not been able to measure with much precision the distance that it separates from his star, if they know that complete a lap around it in just 36 hours which means you must be very close to it.
KELT-9b has been discovered thanks to the use of HARPS-N, a tool located in the Canary Islands
The importance of having discovered a planet like this lies in the theories that until now we had about the possibility that a star similar to our Jupier was hot enough to contain traces of free metals in its atmosphere. After all this waiting time, we have finally managed to discover in space one and we can observe and study it directly.
As expected, we cannot look for a utility as such for this gas giant, especially in terms of habitability, although the truth, as several astronomers have already commented, its study may be of tremendous utility in helping to fine-tune the measuring instruments that calculate the proportion of chemical elements in an exoplanet's atmosphere and this is necessary to determine if a specific star that we meet in the future is habitable or not.
Finally, I would just like to tell you, especially at a time when we see how certain governments and research and development centers spend huge increases of money on projects where they seek to further improve the tools that allow us to make this type of discoveries, which KELT-9b has been made thanks to the use of the High Precision Radial Velocity Planet Finder in the Northern Hemisphere o HARPS-N, a tool that is nothing more than a high precision spectrometer that is located in the Canary Islands.