The huge planet far away from astrology, like a sun-like star

A team of astronomers led by Dutch scientists directly imagined a huge planet orbiting a long distance around a sun-like star. Why this planet is so massive and how it came to be there is a mystery. Researchers will publish their findings in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics.

The planet in question is YSES 2b, located 360 light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation of Musca (Latin for Fly). The gaseous planet is six times heavier than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The newly discovered planet orbits 110 times farther from its star than Earth from the sun (or 20 times the distance between the sun and Jupiter). The companion star is only 14 million years old and resembles our childhood sun.

The large distance from the planet to the star presents astronomers with a puzzle, as it does not seem to fit any of the two best-known models of the formation of large gaseous planets. If the planet had grown in its current location, far from the star through basic accretion, it would be too heavy, because there is not enough material to create a huge planet at this great distance from the star. If the planet was created by so-called gravitational instability on the planetary disk, it does not seem to be heavy enough. A third possibility is that the planet formed close to the star by basic accumulation and then migrated outward. Such a migration would, however, require the gravitational influence of a second planet, which researchers have not yet found.

Astronomers will continue to investigate the surroundings of this unusual planet and its star in the near future and hope to learn more about the system and will continue to search for other gaseous planets around young, sun-like stars. Today’s telescopes are not yet large enough to take direct images of earth-like planets around sun-like stars.

Principal Investigator Alexander Bohn (Leiden University): “By investigating more Jupiter-like exoplanets in the near future, we will learn more about the processes of the formation of gas giants around sun-like stars.”

The planet YSES 2b was discovered using the Young Exoplanet Survey (YSES). This survey has already provided the first direct image of a multi-planet system around a sun-like star in 2020. Researchers made their observations in 2018 and 2020 using the very large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. For this they used the SPHERE instrument of the telescope. This tool was co-developed by the Netherlands and can capture direct and indirect light from exoplanets.