Newly discovered giant planet baffles astronomers
Thanh Ha4-4 minutes 20/4/2021
The giant planet orbiting a sun-like star at a great distance was directly photographed by an astronomical team led by Dutch scientists.
Why the planet is so big and how the giant planet got there so far from its star is a mystery. The researchers plan to publish their discovery of the planet in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, according to Phys.org.
The planet in question is YSES 2b, 360 light-years from Earth in the southern direction of the constellation Musca. This gaseous planet is 6 times heavier than Jupiter – the largest planet in the solar system.
The planet YSES 2b orbits more than 110 times farther from its star than the distance between the earth and the sun (or 20 times the distance between the sun and Jupiter).
The newly discovered gas giant companion star is only 14 million years old and resembles the youth of the sun in the Milky Way.
Live image of the exoplanet YSES 2b (bottom right) and its star (centre). The star is occulted because of the coronagraph – a tool that helps to remove the star’s light inside the telescope. Photo: European Space Agency ESO.
Live image of the exoplanet YSES 2b (bottom right) and its star (centre). The star is occulted because of the coronagraph – a tool that helps to remove the star’s light inside the telescope. Photo: European Space Agency
The distant distance from the planet YSES 2b to its star is a problem for astronomers to find a solution because this existence does not seem to fit the two best-known models of the formation of stars. big gas planet.
If the newly discovered giant planet grows at its current position far from the star by core accretion, it will be too massive because there isn’t enough material to form a giant planet at such a large distance. with star.
If planet YSES 2b was created from gravitational instability in the planetary disk, the planet is unlikely to be massive enough.
A third possibility is that the planet was formed close to the star by core accretion and then moved outward. However, such an exodus requires the gravitational influence of a second planet, but researchers have yet to find such a planet.
Astronomers will continue to investigate the surroundings of this unusual planet and its star in the near future and hope to learn more about the system. Researchers are also continuing to look for other gaseous planets around young, sun-like stars.
Current telescopes on earth are still not large enough to obtain direct images of earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars.
“By investigating more Jupiter-like exoplanets in the near future, we will learn more about the formation of gas giants around sun-like stars.” Alexander Bohn, Leiden University (Netherlands) said.
Planet YSES 2b was discovered by the Young Suns Exoplanet Survey (YSES). The survey provides the first direct image of a multi-planet system around a sun-like star in 2020. The researchers observed in 2018 and 2020 via the Very Large Telescope (VLT). ) of the European Southern Hemisphere Research Organization (ESO) in Chile. The researchers used the telescope’s SPHERE instrument for this activity. The instrument was co-developed by the Netherlands and can capture light directly and indirectly from extrasolar planets.
