A gigantic gaseous exoplanet was discovered at low density, so it’s a type called a “marshmallow planet”, after the famous low-density candy.
The new planet, named TOI-3757 b, orbits a cold red dwarf star and was detected by a number of instruments, including the NEID Radial Velocity Instrument on the 3.5-meter Wayne telescope at Kit Peak National Observatory, in Kunlan Mountains, located in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, USA.
According to a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal, the planet is the most gas sensitive planet ever discovered around a cold red dwarf star.
Astronomers using the Wayne telescope observed a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a cold red dwarf star, located about 580 light-years from Earth in the constellation Auriga. This planet, named TOI-3757 b, was so, for being a planet orbiting a red dwarf star, to be placed in a class of planets called “Marshmallows”.
Red dwarf stars are the smallest and faintest members of the so-called main stars, which are stars that convert hydrogen to helium in their nuclei at a constant rate.
Although “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be very energetic and erupt with powerful flares that strip a planet of its atmosphere, making this star system seemingly an “inhospitable place” to believe. A sparsely populated planet.
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“Giant planets around red dwarf stars have traditionally been thought to be difficult to form, but they are not,” said Shubham Kanudia, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study. , in a report published Thursday by the National Science Foundation website along with the publication of the study. Only small samples have been analyzed by Doppler surveys, which often find giant planets far from these red dwarf stars, and so far. We did not have a planetary sample large enough to find the nearby gas planets in a robust way ”.
There are still unexplained mysteries surrounding the discovered planet, the most important of which is how a gas giant planet could form around a red dwarf star, specifically a low-density planet, however the research team thinks they may have a solution. because of this. mystery
They suggest that the planet’s extremely low density could be the result of two factors: the first has to do with the planet’s rocky core. Gas giants are believed to start out as a huge rocky core with a mass nearly ten times the mass of Earth, at which point they quickly attract large amounts of nearby gas to form the gas giants we see today and the planet’s star. It contains less abundance of heavy elements than other stellar dwarfs. With gas giants, this may have caused the shale core to form slower, delaying the onset of gas buildup and thus affecting the planet’s overall density.
The second factor could be the planet’s orbit, which is initially thought to be slightly elliptical, and there are times when it gets closer to its star than at other times, causing a dramatic rise in temperature that could cause the planet’s atmosphere to swell. .
