University of Cambridge, UK | 2018 Oct 15
Researchers have identified a young star with four Jupiter and Saturn-sized planets in orbit around it, the first time that so many massive planets have been detected in such a young system. The system has also set a new record for the most extreme range of orbits yet observed: the outermost planet is more than a thousand times further from the star than the innermost one, which raises interesting questions about how such a system might have formed.
The star is just two million years old – a ‘toddler’ in astronomical terms – and is surrounded by a huge disc of dust and ice. This disc, known as a protoplanetary disc, is where the planets, moons, asteroids and other astronomical objects in stellar systems form.
The star was already known to be remarkable because it contains the first so-called hot Jupiter - a massive planet orbiting very close to its parent star – to have been discovered around such a young star. Although hot Jupiters were the first type of exoplanet to be discovered, their existence has long puzzled astronomers because they are often thought to be too close to their parent stars to have formed in situ. ...
High-Resolution Millimeter Imaging of the CI Tau Protoplanetary Disk:
A Massive Ensemble of Protoplanets from 0.1 to 100 au ~ Cathie J. Clarke et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 866(1):L6 (2018 Oct 10) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aae36b
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1809.08147 > 21 Sep 2018
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