Astronomers have discovered a strange new planet just 35 light-years from Earth, where day and night look exactly the same.
The exoplanet, called Coconuts-2b, is a gas giant six times the size of Jupiter and orbits a low-mass red dwarf more than 900 billion kilometers from it – 6,000 times more than the relatively short 151.87 million kilometers between Earth and the Sun.
The wide orbit and low temperature of its red dwarf star make the day in the sky look almost exactly like night, with the star appearing as a bright red glow.
The Coconut-2b classification and its Coconut-2 system were unexpected as it came from a PhD student at the University of Hawaii Astronomy Institute, Zhoujian Zhang. Coconuts-2b was first discovered by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite in 2011, but is believed to be a free-floating object rather than a star.
Coconuts-2b is also bound to a low-mass star called Coconuts-2a, which is one-third the mass of our Sun and ten times younger than our four-billion-year-old Sun.
“With a massive planet in orbit with a very large separation and with a very cold central star, Coconuts-2 represents a completely different planetary system from our own solar system,” said Zhang, who was looking for a friend from a distant star. his doctoral thesis, said.
Coconuts-2b is the second coldest exoplanet ever recorded at a temperature of just 160 degrees Celsius and, because of its low energy output, can only be detected with infrared light. There is some residual heat from the planet that has been trapped since its formation but is still more than a million times weaker than our sun.
“Light from gas giant planets to directly detect and study other stars is usually very difficult because the planets we find usually have small orbits and are therefore buried in the light of their parent star,” said Michael Liu, Zhang’s thesis advisor.
“With its enormous orbital distance, Coconuts-2b would be a great laboratory for studying the atmosphere and composition of young gas giant planets.”
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