• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Forbidden” Giant Planet Around Dwarf Star Challenges What We Know About Planetary Formation

February 25, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Red dwarfs are the most common type of stars out there. They are smaller and less luminous than our Sun and live for much longer. They are also a great place for planets to form, but not every type of planet: current models suggest that they are an unlikely place for gas giants to form. So imagine the surprise when astronomers found planet TOI-5205b.

The planet is slightly larger and heavier than Jupiter but it orbits a star that is just a bit bigger. At 40 percent of the mass of the Sun, the ratio between the planet’s mass versus the star’s mass is 0.3 percent. The highest among all known planets orbiting red dwarfs.

Advertisement

“The host star, TOI-5205, is just about four times the size of Jupiter, yet it has somehow managed to form a Jupiter-sized planet, which is quite surprising!” lead author Shubham Kanodia, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.

Comparison size between the red dwarf and its planet and the Sun and Jupiter

If Jupiter and this exoplanet are the size of a pea, the Sun is a grapefruit and TOI-5205 is a Lemon. Image Credit: Katherine Cain, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Planets form in the circumstellar disk, a disk of material that surrounds newborn stars. A planet this size would need to accumulate a rocky core of about 10 Earth masses and subsequently get enough gas to reach something close to 320 times the mass of our planet. And models did not expect this scenario to take place around a red dwarf.

“TOI-5205b’s existence stretches what we know about the disks in which these planets are born,” Kanodia explained. “In the beginning, if there isn’t enough rocky material in the disk to form the initial core, then one cannot form a gas giant planet. And at the end, if the disk evaporates away before the massive core is formed, then one cannot form a gas giant planet. And yet TOI-5205b formed despite these guardrails. Based on our nominal current understanding of planet formation, TOI-5205b should not exist; it is a ‘forbidden’ planet.”

The planet was first spotted by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). It was then followed up by Kanodia’s team and they were able to confirm it was indeed a planet and work out some of its properties. The planet was discovered with the transit method, by looking at the light of its star. TESS measured a dip in the light as the planet passed in front of it. And it was quite the dip. Seven percent of the light was blocked, one of the largest known in exoplanet transit.

Advertisement

Such an extreme feature bodes well for future observations, including from space observatory JWST.

Details of this discovery are reported in The Astronomical Journal.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. IFRC urges urgent global humanitarian support for Afghanistan
  2. Pro-Putin party heads for Russian election win after Navalny clampdown
  3. The Viral Shark That Looks Like Spiderman’s Venom Is A Real Species
  4. The Surprising Benefits Of Group Exercise For Anxious Dogs

Source Link: "Forbidden" Giant Planet Around Dwarf Star Challenges What We Know About Planetary Formation

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • When Red Devil Spiders Arrived On A New Island, Their Genome Dramatically Shrank In Half
  • Is This The World’s Oldest Story? Ancient Human Tale About The Seven Sisters May Be From 100,000 BCE
  • This Pill Is Actually A Tiny Printer That Repairs Internal Injuries Using Biocompatible Ink
  • “This Is Amazing”: Scientists Have Found Evidence Of A Long-Lost World Deep Within The Earth
  • From The Shiniest World To Lava And Eternal Darkness, These Are The Weirdest Known Planets
  • Do Sharks Have Bones?
  • The Zombie Awakens: A Volcano Is Showing “First Signs” Of Unrest After 700,000 Years Of Quiet
  • Two Of The World’s Biggest Earthquakes Seem To Be Synched Together
  • California Has A New State Snake, And It’s A 1.6-Meter-Long Giant
  • Experimental Nanoparticle “Super-Vaccines” Stop Breast, Pancreatic, And Skin Cancers In Their Tracks
  • New Nightmare Fuel Unlocked: Watch The First Known Capture Of A Shrew By A False Widow Spider
  • Peculiar Glow In The Milky Way Might Be Dark Matter Signature
  • “I Was Scared To Death”: Missouri’s Great Cobra Scare Of 1953 Was Eventually Solved After 35 Years
  • Two Spacecraft To Fly Through Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Ion Tail – Will They Be Able To Catch Something?
  • Pioneering Heavy Water Detection Suggests Earth’s Water Might Be Older Than The Sun
  • PhD Students’ Groundbreaking New Technique Rescues JWST’s Highest Resolution Data
  • Popcorn-Like Parasites And Weird Worms Among 14 New Species Discovered In The World’s Oceans
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version