on 285 light years away From our solar system lies a beautiful and simple cosmic neighborhood. Its “sun,” you might say, is a small glowing crimson object named TOI-5205 – a red dwarf.
Plunging into the void of space, we have now located exactly one planetary friend of TOI-5205, according to the paper. published This week in the Astronomical Journal.
Scientists call it TOI-5205b. Yes, that nickname is based on my looks, but you have to admit it’s also kinda cute.
OK, but here’s the thing.
It is very typical for red dwarfs to anchor the planets (often several), because these stellar bodies are only half the temperature of the Sun and have a very low luminosity, yet they are known to have extremely long average lives. Even TOI-5205 is measured at about 3,500 K (3,227 °C), in contrast to our Sun’s 5,800 K (5,526 °C).
However, there are two special aspects of companionship to TOI-5205 and TOI-5205b.
First, red dwarfs are not expected to host gas giant planets – but that is exactly what TOI-5205b is. Second, and more importantly, Sun-like stars in general are usually thought to host planets much smaller than themselves.
“The host star, TOI-5205, is four times the size of Jupiter, and yet it has somehow managed to create a planet the size of Jupiter, which is absolutely amazing!” Shubham Kanodia, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and co-author of the study, he said in a statement. “Based on our nominally current understanding of planet formation, TOI-5205b should not exist.”
It’s a ‘forbidden’ planet.
To put this size discrepancy in context, Kanodia makes a compelling analogy.
You can think of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star like a pea orbiting a grapefruit. However, TOI-5205b circling TOI-5205 is very similar to a pea circling a lemon.
To be clear, something the size of Jupiter shouldn’t be dismissed as a diminutive — let alone something many times larger than Jupiter. Basically, if you took every planet in our solar system, slapped their masses together, and multiplied the sum by two, you got A piece the size of our beloved giant.
However, hundreds of Jupiters could fit inside our sun. Only four TOI-5205b can fit inside its “sun”.
A size comparison showing what TOI-5205b would look like orbiting its star (left) and sun (right).
Kathryn Cain is provided by the Carnegie Institution for Science.
So what could have happened so long ago, when the TOI-5205 star system was first established, to create such a strange pairing of cosmic bodies? The simple answer is we don’t know yet. Kanodia and his colleagues have some leads, but ultimately say they will need to observe them in more detail to solve the mystery. Solving this puzzle may reorder our knowledge of it Planet formation theory.
“We know TOI-5205 b exists, so there is a gap in our understanding of these disks, the planetary interiors, or the planet formation process (or the more likely scenario, all of the above!),” Kanodia said. wrote in a blog post about the discovery.
In short, when young stars traverse the depths of space, they tend to have disks of interstellar gas, and fragments of rock and dust surrounding them.
that The established model for the formation of planets – For gas giants like Jupiter and TOI-5205b – it says you need about 10 Earth masses of disk material to make a rocky planetary core. Then, tons of gas from the disk begins to gather around that core, eventually forming into worlds as massive and squishy as our solar system’s tangerine-striped icon.
But the protodisk of TOI-5205 is not expected to contain enough gas giant building blocks to form a Jupiter body.
“Initially, if there wasn’t enough rocky material in the disk to form the initial core, one couldn’t form a gas giant planet,” Kanodia said. “And in the end, if the disk evaporated before the massive core formed, one wouldn’t be able to form a gas giant planet.”
“However,” Kanodia continued, “TOI-5205b formed in spite of these roadblocks.”
Catherine Cain, Courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science
On the bright side, however, because the size ratio between the two pairs in deep space is so close (when TOI-5205b passes in front of its star from our viewpoint, it blocks 7 percent of the orb’s light) the pair is very easy to study.
Researchers are particularly interested in using the groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope to understand the unusual background of the TOI-5205 star system. Designed to assess the universe with an unfiltered lens, JWST has already in just over a year been able to find A whole new world of its ownDraw a detailed picture of a file Grill the hot orbChemical fingerprint and could soon determine what that could be The smallest exoplanet on record.
At the end of the day, Kanodia wrote in his blog post, the question is: “TOI-5205 b — while certainly strange — isn’t the only one. If so, how often do these barred planets form?”
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