They discover a huge planet in the orbit of two of the biggest and hottest stars

(CNN) – Astronomers discovered a planet orbiting in a double star system so hot and gigantic that some astronomers did not think a planet could exist around it.

The giant exoplanet, located outside our solar system, was discovered orbiting b Centauri, a stellar pair located 325 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is the hottest and most massive star system to host a planet ever found.

The astronomers were able to capture an image of the planet using the “Very Large Telescope” of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The binary star system is actually visible to the naked eye. The giant planet, which is 10 times more massive than Jupiter, orbits the pair of stars at 100 times the distance between Jupiter and the Sun. It is one of the largest planets ever found.

A study detailing the image and the findings was published Wednesday in the magazine Nature.

“Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting, as it completely changes the landscape on massive stars hosting planets,” said lead study author Markus Janson, professor of astronomy at Stockholm University, Sweden. it’s a statement.

The giant binary star b Centauri, which is astronomically young at 15 million years (our sun is 4.6 billion years old), is at least six times the mass of our Sun. Until this discovery, no planets had been found around stars. with more than three times the mass of our star.

The stellar pair is also more than three times hotter than our Sun, so it emits enormous amounts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.

An unexpected exoplanet with a wide orbit

All of these factors were expected to have a detrimental effect on the gas within the system, likely preventing planet formation because the highly energetic radiation causes the material to evaporate more quickly.

“Type B stars are generally considered quite destructive and dangerous environments, so it was believed that it should be excessively difficult to form large planets around them,” Janson said.

Instead, the planet, dubbed b Centauri b, remains at such a great distance from its stars that this incredibly wide orbit likely allows it to survive.

“The planet in b Centauri is an alien world in an environment that is completely different from what we experience here on Earth and in our solar system,” said study co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a doctoral student at Stockholm University, in a statement. “It is a harsh environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale: the stars are bigger, the planet is bigger, the distances are greater.”

Rethinking the formation of planets

This is just one of many discoveries that rewrite what scientists understand about planet formation, especially under extreme circumstances.

“We’ve always had a very solar system-centric view of what planetary systems are ‘supposed’ to be,” study co-author Matthias Samland, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement. “In the last ten years, the discovery of many planetary systems in surprising and novel configurations has made us broaden our historically narrow view. This discovery adds another exciting chapter to this story, this time for massive stars.”

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope will be operational later this decade, and its observing capabilities will allow scientists to begin to understand how this planet formed.

“It will be an intriguing task trying to figure out how it was formed, which is a mystery at the moment,” Janson said.