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It’s possible that the planet did form via core accretion but closer in, before a gravitational encounter flung it outward. Though perhaps there’s a loophole, since those disks dissipate from the inside out, giving planets on the widest orbits more time to grow. This is especially true around massive stars, whose intense radiation dissipates gas more quickly than around smaller stars. The heft of those forming beyond the system’s snow lines, where gases turn to ices, attracts a gaseous outer layer.īut if planets form too far out, there won’t be any gas for them to attract. Early on, when a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas still surrounds the star, dust grains stick together, collide, and merge their way up to planet sizes.
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How to Form a Giant, Far Out PlanetĪstronomers think giant planets form via core accretion. But the planet is a million times more massive than the Kuiper Belt object, which puts planet formation scenarios to the test. The planet, dubbed b Centauri (AB)b to denote that it circles both massive stars, stands out both for its mass and its orbit, which is one of the widest known - equivalent to that of Sedna in the outer solar system. Given uncertainties in the evolution of young giant planets, it’s probably between 9.3 and 12.5 Jupiters, near the edge of the dividing line between planets and the failed stars known as brown dwarfs. The planet’s mass, which comes from measurements of the glow leftover from its formation, isn’t pinned down exactly. Including the earlier observation enabled the researchers to trace the object’s orbit and confirm that not only is it moving with the b Centauri system, it’s actually orbiting the central stars. The planet was visible back then but discarded for being too faint.
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The real kicker, though, was an observation taken two decades earlier as part of a different project. Follow up in 2021 confirmed the planet’s existence. Markus Janson (Stockholm University, Sweden) and colleagues discovered the planet in observations taken in 2019 as part of the B-star Exoplanet Abundance Study (BEAST), using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The discovery, published in the December 9th Nature, challenges our notions of how planets form. While Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun is five times wider than Earth’s, this planet is 100 times farther out, circling its star at 560 times the average Earth-Sun distance. The other bright dot in the image (top right) is a background star.Īstronomers have imaged a giant planet around a massive pair of stars known as b Centauri. The planet, visible as a bright dot in the lower right of the frame, is a super-Jupiter that orbits the pair at 560 a.u. The bright and dark rings around it are imaging artifacts. The duo, which have a total mass of at least six Suns, is the bright object in the top left corner of the image. This is the first time astronomers have directly observed a planet orbiting a star pair this massive. This image shows the massive binary system known as b Centauri and its giant planet, b Centauri (AB)b.