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September 30, 2019 01:59 am

Giant Planet Around Tiny Star 'Should Not Exist'

Thelasko quotes the BBC:Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories. The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form. The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.... The distant star has a mass that's, at most, 270 times larger than the planet. For comparison, the Sun is about 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter. The finding challenges the widely held idea of planet formation known as core accretion. "Usually we think of giant planets starting life as an icy-core, orbiting far out in a disc of gas surrounding the young star, and then growing rapidly by attracting gas on to itself," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study.. "But the authors argue that the discs around small stars don't provide enough material for this to work. Instead, they consider it more likely that the planet formed suddenly when part of the disc collapsed due to its own gravity."

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