Alien Planet Found: Gas Giant 11 Times Bigger Than Jupiter Stumps Scientists
An alien planet has been found in a distant solar system, and the exoplanet has been judged to be 11 times the size of Jupiter- it's one of the biggest gas giants ever. The planet is 650 times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, which is forcing astronomers to rethink theories on how planets are formed.
The alien planet was discovered by a team of researchers led by Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student. The gas giant, which has a surface temperature of 2,732 degrees Farenheit, orbits star HD106906 at 15 to 30 times the orbit of the Earth around our own sun.
"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," Bailey, who is from the University of Arizona, said in a statement about their findings to Space.com.
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In normal planet formation, the theory is that small amount of gas clump together around stars during their early stages, then the gravity of the star continues to pull matter towards that group. However, the distance of the recently discovered planet largely ignores the ideas posited by that theory.
Researchers' best guess about the gas giant was that it formed in between two stars, then the other star collapsed. However, that usually happens with stars that have a mass of 10-to-1 at the most.
"In our case, the mass ratio, is more than 100-to-1," Bailey explained. "This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories- just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star."
"Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models," Bailey said. "Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question."
