A planet has been found orbiting a double-star system that is so hot and massive that some astronomers didn’t think a planet could exist around it.
The giant exoplanet, or planet located outside our solar system, was discovered orbiting “b Centauri”, a star pair located 325 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. This is the hottest and most massive planet-hosting star system found so far.
Astronomers managed to capture an image of the planet using the Very Large Telescope from the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The binary star system is actually visible to us with the naked eye.
The giant planet, which is 10 times the mass of Jupiter, orbits the pair of stars 100 times the distance between Jupiter and the sun. It is one of the most massive planets ever found.
A study detailing the image and the results was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday (9).
“Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting, as it completely changes the image of massive stars as the planet’s hosts,” said the study’s lead author, Markus Janson, professor of astronomy at Stockholm University in Sweden.
The giant binary star b Centauri, which is astronomically young at 15 million years old – our sun is 4.6 billion years old – is at least six times as massive as our sun. Until this discovery, no planets have been found around stars more than three times the mass of our star.
The stellar pair is also three times hotter than our sun, so it releases a huge amount of ultraviolet radiation and X-rays.
Unexpected planet with a wide orbit
All of these factors were expected to have a detrimental effect on the gas within the system, which would likely prevent planets from forming, because the highly energetic radiation causes the material to evaporate more quickly.
“Type B stars are generally considered to be very destructive and dangerous environments, so it was believed that it would be extremely difficult to form large planets around them,” Janson said.
Instead, the planet, dubbed b Centauri b, remains so far away from its stars that this incredibly wide orbit likely allows the planet to survive.
“The planet at b Centauri is a strange world in a completely different environment than what we experience here on Earth and in our Solar System,” said study co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a doctoral student at Stockholm University.
“It is a hostile environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale: the stars are bigger, the planet is bigger, the distances are greater”, he added.
Rethinking the formation of the planet
It’s just one of many discoveries that rewrite what scientists understand about planet formation, especially in extreme circumstances.
“We’ve always had a very solar system-centric view of what planetary systems ‘should’ look like,” said study co-author Matthias Samland, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
“Over the past ten years, the discovery of many planetary systems in surprising and innovative configurations has made us broaden our historically narrow vision. This discovery adds another exciting chapter to this story, this time for massive stars.”
The European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope will go online later this decade, and its observational capabilities will allow scientists to begin to understand how this planet formed.
“It will be an intriguing task to try to figure out how it could have formed, which is a mystery at the moment,” Janson said.
(Text translated, read original in English here)
Reference: CNN Brasil
Donald-43Westbrook, a distinguished contributor at worldstockmarket, is celebrated for his exceptional prowess in article writing. With a keen eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, Donald crafts engaging and informative content that resonates with readers across a spectrum of financial topics. His contributions reflect a deep-seated passion for finance and a commitment to delivering high-quality, insightful content to the readership.
