NASA 的 Chandra 太空望远镜的 X 射线观测显示，系外行星正在萎缩：“这颗年轻行星的未来看起来不妙”

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have witnessed a distant, Jupiter-size world "shrinking" as its host star bombards it with heavy radiation.

The extrasolar planet, or "" is named TOI 1227 b and is a cosmic baby at just 8 million years old (remember, Earth is around 4.5 billion years old). And, incredibly, the world orbits its star at a distance of just 8.2 million miles, a fraction of the distance between the sun and , with a year that lasts just 28 days. This proximity means the star, named TOI 1227 and located around 330 light-years away, is blasting the planet with powerful X-rays.

This radiation is stripping the exoplanet's atmosphere away; in fact, the atmosphere of TOI 1227 b is likely to be completely gone in around 1 billion years. This will reduce the exoplanet to nothing more than a small, rocky and barren core.

The team behind this research estimates TOI 1227 b will have ultimately lost the equivalent of two Earths' worth of mass by the conclusion of its transformation. As of now, the world has a mass around 17 times that of 's.

. "The planet's atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star."

While this exoplanet's parent star is less massive than the sun (with about 10% the mass of our star) and is cooler and fainter in optical light, it is actually brighter than our star in X-rays.

"A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they're receiving," team member and RIT scientist Joel Kastner said in the statement. "We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star."