Jakarta –
The gas giant planet AB Aurigae b is categorized as an infant planet, according to the life stages of a planet. This is a planet that was still in very early formation, when astronomers discovered it. Nine times the mass of the planet Jupiter, the distance to its parent star is very far, and opens new challenges related to understanding so far about how planets form.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System with a mass of about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter has a very large mass in the Solar System. Even if all the masses of the planets in the system were combined, they would still weigh about two and a half times the total mass of the planets.
However, the discovery of the gas giant planet AB Aurigae b makes Jupiter like a small gas balloon.
“We suspect this planet is still in the early stages of its birth,” astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and the NASA Ames Research Center told Reuters. Currie is the lead author of the planet-discovery research, which has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“Evidence suggests this is the earliest stage of the formation of a gas giant planet that has ever been observed,” said the astrophysicist. The gas giant planets have small solid cores, and are formed from enormous masses of gas, usually hydrogen and helium rotating around their cores.
The Solar System has two gas giant planets, Saturn and Jupiter. While other planets such as Mars or Earth are called rock planets.
Planets are not common
The researchers detected the gas giant planet with the help of two telescopes, one on Earth and the other in Earth orbit. They are the Subaru terrestrial telescope, which is located atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in low-Earth orbit.
Like most planets, AB Aurigae b also has a parent star, which the researchers named AB Aurigae. This star is also relatively young, about two billion years. In comparison, the sun, which is the parent star in the Solar System, is about 4.6 billion years old, and is also a young star.
Usually planets are in disks of cosmic gas and dust that are orbital expansions of their parent stars. The planets were formed from the material present in this cosmic disk, where cosmic dust swirled and collided with each other to form larger rocks.
That’s how normally a planetary system and its parent star are created. However, there is something unusual about the formation of the gas giant planet AB Aurigae b.
Planets and parent stars are very far apart
Planet AB Aurigae b and its parent star AB Aurigae were observed to be too far apart for a planetary system in the orbital of the cosmic dust disk around the star to form a planet.
The planet AB Aurigae b is three times farther from its parent star than Neptune is from the Sun. As is known, Neptune is the outermost planet in the Solar System with a distance of about 4.5 billion kilometers from the sun. This means that astronomers are now observing a star that is three times farther than the normal furthest distance they normally observe in the Solar System.
“This kind of process, usually cannot form giant planets at very large orbital distances. Finding these planets is a new challenge to our understanding of planet formation,” Olivier Guyon, an astronomer at the Subaru Telescope and at the University of Arizona, told the BBC. Reuters.
The researchers believe the planet may have formed when the cosmic disk around its parent star cooled, gravity triggered fragments of matter to form larger masses, and one of them became a gas giant planet.
“As the saying goes, there are many ways to cook eggs, there seems to be more than one process in the universe, to form a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter,” concluded astrophysicist Currie.
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