Enormous planet found orbiting infant star

A popular astronomical theory states that large planets don’t exist around young stars because planets of significant mass take too long to form.

However, a team of astronomers announced on Thursday that they have indeed found a giant planet orbiting a star so young, it is still surrounded by remnants of the disk of gas and dust that formed it.

“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said team member Christopher Johns-Krull, an astronomer from Rice Unversity. “That’s been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation.”

Planet much larger than anything in our solar system

Described in a report set to be published by the Astrophysical Journal, the newly-discovered planet is about eight times bigger than Jupiter and has been called CI Tau b. The planet circles a 2 million-year-old star in the constellation Taurus, located around 450 light years from Earth.

CI Tau b is in a very tight orbit around its star, circling once every nine days. The planet was discovered with the radial velocity technique, a planet-hunting process that uses slight distinctions in the velocity of a star to figure out the gravitational pull applied by nearby planets that are too weak to see directly with a telescope. The discovery was the culmination of a survey started in 2004 of 140 candidate stars.

“This result is unique because it demonstrates that a giant planet can form so rapidly that the remnant gas and dust from which the young star formed, surrounding the system in a Frisbee-like disk, is still present,” said study author Lisa Prato, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. “Giant planet formation in the inner part of this disk, where CI Tau b is located, will have a profound impact on the region where smaller terrestrial planets are also potentially forming.”

Johns-Krull said his team has looked at about half of the young stars in the initial survey sample, and the data suggests more planets could be found soon.

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Image credit: ESO, CC BY

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