Astronomers have discovered that a gas giant is unusually heavy and orbits very far from its host star.
Named YSES 2b, the new planet revolves around the young star TYC 8984-2245-1, or YSES 2, in the constellation Thuong Deng 360 light years from Earth. It is 6.3 times heavier than Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system – and is located 115 astronomical units from its star, or about 115 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
This discovery baffled scientists because the massive mass of YSES 2b and the distance between it and its host star does not match the most common patterns of gas giant planet formation.
“If the planet formed in its present position by nucleus accretion, it would not have enough material to reach enormous dimensions at such a great distance from the star. Due to the gravitational instability in the planetary disk, neither is it. Such a migration requires the gravitational effect of a second planet that the team has not yet found, ”explains lead author Alexander Bohn of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Low.
In the next phase, Bohn and his colleagues want to continue scanning the environment around YSES 2 to look for possible exoplanets in this system. The team also hopes that more advanced telescopes in the future will allow YSES 2b to be captured with better resolution.
YSES 2b was discovered by SPHERE, a high contrast exoplanet research device on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the Southern European Observatory (ESO). The device jointly developed by the Netherlands can capture light directly and indirectly from planets outside the solar system. The new discovery was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
