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Star Rips Exoplanet To Shreds With X-Rays
astroengine writes "Some relationships are doomed from the beginning, and the same can be said of some planetary systems. In the case of the star CoRoT-2a, some 880 light-years from Earth, it is quite literally ripping its orbiting exoplanet to shreds. Five million tons of material per second is being stripped from the closely orbiting world CoRoT-2b by powerful stellar X-rays. But it's OK, the destructive nature of this planetary system is mutual; CoRoT-2b's orbit is likely maintaining the high spin rate of the star, boosting magnetic activity, thus boosting the X-ray output."
There's a rumor going around that the Department of Homeland Security has ordered 10 of these, for the 10 busiest airports.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think the idea is that forcing the star to emit a larger number of highly energetic x-rays is likely costing the star energy, which will lead to it dying somewhat earlier. By some metrics, that would count as damage.
TFA more accurately uses "negative reinforcement" rather than mutually destructive.
Old news. This happened 880 years ago.
...of what could have been had Mercury been ten million miles or so closer to the Sun: considering how much energy the average Main Sequence yellow dwarf star is emitting (4E+26W), converting nearly 5 million tonnes of matter to energy every second, and that's before you start to consider mutual tidal forces exerted on the Sun by every other body in the Universe (obviously more pronounced for closer bodies such as solar system planets) which not only impart wobbles and bulges but also cause the sun to spin at differential and changing rates, though in the latter case to a much lesser extent than that caused by its own nature; the Sun is self-destructive but is is also mutually destructive to those closer bodies, saying that it is also constructive in that, for example, over billions of years a veneer of frozen helium 3 has formed and is persistent over the Lunar poles, and the thinnest of atmospheres of He3 is also present - this veneer is constantly replenished by a solar particle stream.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
...it could well buy time for itself considering that our own sun, a main sequence star of very average proportions, is converting not quite 5 million tonnes of matter to energy a second...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Yeah, fission- or fusion-pumped X-ray lasers are a staple of military hard SF. Footfall was full of them, right at the end, where somehow the US constructed a secret Project Orion battleship with X-ray laser launchers and parasite fighters (Space Shuttles fitted with missile racks in the cargo bays). I call this hard SF, but the technologist inside me was screaming "FANTASY!" the whole time.
Anyway, speaking of fantasy masquerading as hard technology, SDI was also supposed to build orbital nuke-pumped X-ray lasers as part of their "look down, shoot down" anti-ICMB system.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
COROT-2b is much, much larger than earth. It has a mass of approximately 3.31 times that of Jupiter, which itself is 317.83 times that of earth. (COROT-2b) Your estimate is off by about three orders of magnitude, assuming a constant rate of decay.
At 3.3 times the mass of jupiter, it's mass is about 6.2 * 10^27kg.
5 million tons = 5*10^9kg.
(6.2 * (10^27)) / (5 * (10^9)) = 1.24*10^18. It'll take that many seconds for the start to completely evaporate, assuming mass loss continues to be linear.
That's about 39 billion years, 2.8 times greater than the age of the universe.
The star (together with the planet) will die of something else long before the planet dies of this "ripping to shreds".