(Image: An illustration of a large, blue, banded planet orbiting a red star that is only slightly larger than the planet This artist's rendering shows what giant planet TOI-6894b might look like orbiting its red dwarf host. (Image credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick)
Ginormous planet discovered around tiny red star challenges our understanding of solar systems
Scientists have discovered a giant planet called TOI-6894b, orbiting a star that should be far too small to have formed it. The discovery could further challenge theories of planet formation.
Scientists have spotted a massive planet where one shouldn't be able to exist, according to leading theories of planet formation.
A team of researchers discovered a giant planet, dubbed TOI-6894b, orbiting a low-mass red dwarf star about 241 light-years away from Earth. The findings, published June 4 in the journal Nature Astronomy, add another example to a growing list of space objects that challenge standard models of planet formation.
"It's an intriguing discovery," study co-author Vincent Van Eylen, an astrophysicist at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement. "We don't really understand how a star with so little mass can form such a massive planet! This is one of the goals of the search for more exoplanets."
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For years, astronomers thought low-mass stars, less than roughly a third the mass of our sun, would not be able to accumulate enough material to form giant planets. But a few examples that defy these predictions have cropped up, and scientists are looking for others to help revise theories of planet formation.
To seek out these planets, study co-author Edward Bryant, an astronomer at University College London, and colleagues turned to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA satellite launched in 2018. In a 2023 study, Bryant and colleagues spotted 15 potential giant planets, including TOI-6894b, orbiting low-mass stars. The team homed in on TOI-6894b and its star with additional observations from TESS and several ground-based telescopes.
Combining this data, the researchers found that TOI-6894b has about 17% as much mass as Jupiter, or about 53 times as much mass as Earth. The planet's radius is slightly larger than Saturn's, and it orbits its star — which contains about 20% as much mass as the sun — in just 3 days.
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