An alien planet, believed to be 11 times larger than Jupiter, was discovered recently in the most distant orbit ever found around a parent star, according to Space.com.
The newly discovered exoplanet, known as 106906 b, is bigger than any "planetary body in the solar system" and circles around its star 650 times the average distance between the sun and Earth.
"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a graduate student in the University of Arizona's department of astronomy, in a statement recently.
Most theorist believe planets began as tiny, asteroid-like bodies that "clumped together in primordial disk of gas and dust around the burgeoning star" according to Space.com. This process would not explain how giant planets are formed when they're far away from their star however.
Other opinions suggest that giant planets can form the same way mini binary star systems do, according to Baily.
The graduate student also feels that in the 106906 system, the planet and star could have "collapsed independently" but the materials that helped form the planet were not sufficient enough for it to grow and become a new star.
"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," Bailey said.
There are issues with this possibly however. The difference between the masses of two stars in a binary system is usually not larger than a ratio of 10 to 1, according to Space.com.
"In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1," Bailey said. "This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories, just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star."
Researchers are excited to examine the planet, which they can do thanks to leftover material from when the star and planet formed.
"Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models," Bailey said. "Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question."
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