Scientists have discovered a giant planet that was previously thought to be unsuitable for forming, a giant planet orbiting a giant pair of extremely hot stars.
A research article published on Wednesday Science Journal Nature Named “b Centauri (AB) b” or “b Centauri b”, the discovery of this planet disproves widespread belief among astronomers.
The European Southern Observatory, which imaged the planet from a very large telescope (VLT) in the Chilean desert, wrote: “So far no planet has been found orbiting a star three times the mass of the Sun.
Prof. of Astronomy, University of Stockholm. Marcus Johnson said, “It completely changes the picture of the planets’ host giant stars.”
The “B-type” binary star, located in the center of the Solar System in the Centaurus constellation, is very large and hot. It emits large amounts of high-energy ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which “exerts a strong influence on the surrounding gas that must act against planetary formation,” the ESO said.
“B-type stars are generally considered to be destructive and dangerous, so it is very difficult to form large planets around them,” Johnson said in a statement.
“It’s a harsh atmosphere dominated by intense radiation, where everything is gigantic: the stars are big, the planet is big, the distances are big.”
Gayatri Viswanath is a PhD student at the University of Stockholm
The discovery of the planet was described in July and was officially published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, with the researchers saying that “the results show that the planets could live in gigantic galaxies larger than expected from the extrapolation of previous results.”
Newly discovered b Centauri (AB) b Is an exoplanet, A planet located outside our own solar system, “has 10 times the mass of Jupiter, making it one of the largest planets ever discovered,” ESO wrote.
Gayatri Vishwanath, a PhD student at the University of Stockholm and co-author, added in a press release that this is an alien world in a completely different environment than what we experience on Earth and in our solar system.
“It’s a very harsh atmosphere, dominated by intense radiation, where everything is gigantic: the stars are big, the planet is big, the distances are big,” Viswanath wrote.
Its orbit is 100 times larger than the distance between Jupiter and the Sun, “the widest ever discovered,” ESO wrote. “This great distance from the central pair of stars is important for the survival of the planet.”
The researchers said that although the ESO photograph released this month was the first image of the planet since its detection, b Centauri (AB) b did not recognize it in previous telescope captures.
In an email to NBC News, Johnson said the discovery prompted him and his colleagues to expand BEAST’s survey of 85 similar stars.
“We will try to get more telescope time for an extended survey, and we will scan all the telescope archives after any high-mass stars observed in the past,” Johnson wrote.
“In order to find the planets, but also to characterize them, find out what they contain, and explore them in more detail, I think the search intensity for high-mass stars will increase overall in this region. How they formed.”
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