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A team of astronomers led by Alexander Bohn of the University of Leiden (Netherlands) obtained images of the giant exoplanet YSES 2b, located 360 light-years from Earth. The gaseous planet orbits a Sun-like star at a great distance, YSES 2, which is inconsistent with current theories of planet formation.
For RT
YSES 2b is six times heavier than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, and is 110 times farther away from its star than Sun Earth. In turn, YSES 2 resembles the Sun in its parameters, but is much younger: it is only 14 million years old, while the Sun is 4.5 billion years old.
The discovery was made in the Young Suns Exoplanet (YSES) study and with the support of the Very Large Telescope complex, located in Chile and equipped with SPHERE, a high-contrast spectropolarimetric instrument that allows direct images of exoplanets. The YSES 2 star was observed on April 30, 2018 and December 8, 2020.
The long distances between a star and a planet in such a young system do not fit into either of the two best-known gas giant formation patterns. If the planet had formed in its current location, far from the star and through the accretion of the nucleus, then it could not be as massive, due to the lack of matter in its disk of gas and dust. And if it was created by so-called gravitational instability in the planetary disk, then it doesn’t seem to be hard enough.
It is also possible that the planet formed near the star, through the accretion of the nucleus, and then migrated outward. However, this scenario would require the gravitational influence of a second planet, which has not been found so far.
“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,” Bohn said. The new findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.