Rice: Astronomers Find Giant Planet around Very Young Star
Posted: Thu May 26, 2016 8:52 pm
Astronomers Find Giant Planet around Very Young Star
Rice University | Lowell Observatory | 2016 May 26
A Candidate Young Massive Planet in Orbit around the Classical T Tauri Star CI Tau - Christopher M. Johns-Krull et al
Rice University | Lowell Observatory | 2016 May 26
Jupiter-like ‘CI Tau b’ orbits 2 million-year-old star in constellation Taurus
In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, U.S. astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas and dust.
“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull, ... “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.”
CI Tau b is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a 2 million-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. ...
CI Tau b orbits the star CI Tau once every nine days. The planet was found with the radial velocity method, a planet-hunting technique that relies upon slight variations in the velocity of a star to determine the gravitational pull exerted by nearby planets that are too faint to observe directly with a telescope. The discovery resulted from a survey begun in 2004 of 140 candidate stars in the star-forming region Taurus-Auriga. ...
A Candidate Young Massive Planet in Orbit around the Classical T Tauri Star CI Tau - Christopher M. Johns-Krull et al
- Astrophysical Journal 826(2):206 (2016 Aug 01) DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/826/2/206
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1605.07917 > 25 May 2016