Scientists may have to rethink their ideas about planet formation because of a newfound alien world.
A new study says that an exoplanet 11 times larger than Jupiter is in a young star system.
The planet is among the heaviest ever found. The b Centauri system is the most massive in which a planet has been discovered to date.
The discovery of a planet around b Centauri was very exciting, since it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts, according to the study lead author.
The strangest alien planets are in the gallery.
The most massive known planet-hosting star pair, b Centauri, and its giant planet b Centauri b are shown in this image. A background star is visible in the bright dot in the upper right. The image is from the website of the observatory/Janson et al.
Our sun has been burning for more than 4.5 billion years, while the b Centauri stars are 15 million years old.
The duo's mass makes them unlikely planet hosts. The study team members said that the lightest known planet-harboring star system has a solar mass three times that of the sun.
The bad-parent assumption is strengthened by the b Centauri system's heat and power. The main star, b Centauri A, is a B-type star with an estimated temperature of over 30,000 degrees. That is three times hotter than our G-type sun, and hotter than any other planet-hosting star.
The high-energy X-ray and ultraviolet radiation that is blasted out by b Centauri B tends to scatter planet-forming dust and gas.
"B-type stars are considered to be quite destructive and dangerous environments," Janson said. It was thought that it would be difficult to form large planets around them.
The basics of star names and evolution.
Bucking the odds.
The new planet bucked the odds.
The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile is where Janson and his colleagues discovered b Centauri b.
The instrument has taken pictures of several other planets. The researchers were able to understand the planet, which has other extraordinary characteristics beyond its enormous size and mass. The study team's research showed that the 3.6-meter telescope in Chile was able to image the newfound planet more than 20 years ago, though nobody realized that at the time.
The star duo lies about 14 times farther away than the average distance from the sun. The Earth-sun distance is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.
The study was published in the journal Nature. The planet's survival may be explained by the immense distance, keeping it out of harms way.
At the moment, the origin story of b Centauri b is not clear. It may have formed relatively close to the star through a process called core accretion, in which dust grains in a disk coalesce to form rocky building blocks. The young world could have been thrown to its present location by the forces of nature.
It's possible that b Centauri b was born close to its current position, where core accretion is less viable, given the lower density of material out there. If it did happen, it may have involved a different method called "gravitational instability."
The model requires that the mass of the disk be so large that it causes part of it to collapse. The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory's Kaitlin Kratter wrote in an accompanying "news and views" piece that a small secondary body is created when this happens.
The mechanism that creates objects that are so large that they fail to become planets is related to Kratter. This planet is small, making it less likely to cause instability than core accretion. Maybe it is just a planet like Jupiter, flung out to the far reaches of its stellar system through an interaction with the stars it is in. A broad census of planets associated with large stars will help to clarify the exact mechanism of its formation.
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