Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, according to current knowledge, should be too big for its home star. Yet it orbits around her. The exoplanet is thirteen times larger than Earth, which according to scientists is remarkable in itself, but what is really interesting is its combination with a very cold red dwarf, nine times smaller than our Sun, The Guardian wrote.
Until now, scientists thought that red dwarfs, the most common type of star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, were too small to have planets orbiting them. “This discovery really confirms how little we know about the universe,” said Suvrath Mahadevan of Pennsylvania State University, co-author of the study published in the journal Science. “We didn’t expect such a heavy planet to orbit a star with such a low mass,” he added.
Scientists found the planet LHS 3154b with the help of the Habitable Zone Planet Finder, which records tiny fluctuations in the light emitted by distant stars. These indicate that there is a planet orbiting the star. LHS 3154b orbits its star in close proximity, with one year lasting just 3.7 Earth days. It is thus significantly closer to its star than Mercury, which orbits the Sun in 88 Earth days.
The discovered planet is similar in size and composition to Neptune, the smallest of the gas giants in our Solar System. Neptune, which has a solid core but lacks a solid surface, has an atmosphere composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with a mantle of ammonia and ice. Given its likely Neptunian composition and proximity to its host star, LHS 3154b is unlikely to harbor life, said Princeton University’s Guomundur Stefánsson, lead author of the study.
The red dwarf LHS 3154 is located about 50 light-years from Earth, and according to Stefánsson, it is so small that it “can barely be considered a star.”
2023-12-05 12:40:02
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