An international team of scientists has discovered a new exoplanet that appears to have nuclear fusion continuing in its nucleus. It is the first planet to be directly imaged thanks to the European spacecraft Gaia.
The team found the exoplanet while observing stars at a distance of about 130 light-years from Earth.
The planet is about a third larger than our sun and about 13 times larger than Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system. It appears that nuclear fusion is going on inside it.
When looking at the planet, scientists noticed that it was brightening and dimming, which led them to believe that its core was undergoing a nuclear fusion process.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is designed to accurately locate stars as they move across the sky. The spacecraft is only expected to operate for another two years.
The exoplanet orbits about 483 million kilometers (300 million miles) from the star HD 206893, located about 130 light-years from Earth and about 30% larger than our sun, according to a team of scientists led by Professor Sacha Hinckley at the University of Exeter in the UK.
The exoplanet was named HD 206893 c, a name it gained from its nearby star, HD 206893.
Drawing on the Gaia data, the team used the GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to directly confirm the presence of the new planet.
The observations also allowed the scientists to analyze the optical spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere. Available data indicate that nuclear fusion continues in the nucleus of the giant body with the participation of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
Its sheer size and evidence of nuclear fusion mean that the cosmic giant straddles the line between being a planet and a brown dwarf.
The members of the study team said that this discovery may provide a new insight for scientists to distinguish between massive planets and brown dwarfs.
A brown dwarf is a celestial body between the size of a giant planet and a small star, which is thought to emit infrared radiation.
“The discovery of HD 206893 c is a really important moment in the study of exoplanets, as our discovery may be the first direct detection by Gaia of an exoplanet,” Hinckley said.
