Massive Planet 10 Times Bigger Than Jupiter That Shouldn’t Exist Found!

It has a harsh environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale.

Scientists have discovered an “alien world” nearly ten times the size of Jupiter, sparking speculation about the planet’s origins.

The mysterious new giant gas planet is one of the heaviest ever discovered and was discovered about 325 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation, according to a new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The planet, known as b Centauri b, was discovered orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system with at least six times the mass of the Sun. It is the most powerful and massive planet-hosting system ever discovered.

Until now, astronomers claimed that no planets had been discovered orbiting a star three times the size of the Sun, making it by far the largest system in which a planet has been discovered.

The discovery of the planet, known as “b Centauri (AB)b” or “b Centauri b,” disproves a widely held belief among astronomers, according to a research article published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

“Until now, no planets had been spotted around a star more than three times as massive as the Sun,” wrote the European Southern Observatory, which photographed the planet from its Very Large Telescope in the Chilean desert.

The study’s leader, Markus Janson, a professor of astronomy at Stockholm University, said “it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts.”

According to co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a Ph.D. student at Stockholm University, it is “an alien world in an environment that is completely different from what we experience here on Earth and in our Solar System.”

“It’s 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 bigger,” Viswanath said.

According to the observatory, the planet’s orbit is “one of the widest yet discovered,” measuring 100 times the distance between Jupiter and the sun. “This great distance from the central pair of stars may be critical to the planet’s survival,” it said.

While the photograph published this month is the first of the planet since its identification, researchers claim that b Centauri (AB)b was imaged but unrecognised in the previous telescope captures.

Source: Independent.uk, NBC NEWS