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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 07 2017, @09:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-ate-too-many-tacos dept.

An unusually large gas giant has been found orbiting a red dwarf star. The exoplanet is the first one found by the Next-Generation Transit Survey:

New research, led by Dr Daniel Bayliss and Professor Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick's Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, has identified the unusual planet NGTS-1b - the largest planet compared to the size of its companion star ever discovered in the universe.

NGTS-1b is a gas giant six hundred light years away, the size of Jupiter, and orbits a small star with a radius and mass half that of our sun. Its existence challenges theories of planet formation which state that a planet of this size could not be formed by such a small star. According to these theories, small stars can readily form rocky planets but do not gather enough material together to form Jupiter-sized planets.

The planet is a hot Jupiter, at least as large as the Jupiter in our solar system, but with around 20% less mass. It is very close to its star – just 3% of the distance between Earth and the Sun – and orbits the star every 2.6 days

[...] "The discovery of NGTS-1b was a complete surprise to us - such massive planets were not thought to exist around such small stars. This is the first exoplanet we have found with our new NGTS facility and we are already challenging the received wisdom of how planets form. Our challenge is to now find out how common these types of planets are in the Galaxy, and with the new [Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS)] facility we are well-placed to do just that."

What about brown dwarf pairs?

Also at the German Aerospace Center and Space.com.

NGTS-1b: A hot Jupiter transiting an M-dwarf (can't find arxiv abstract link for some reason)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:15AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:15AM (#593921) Journal

    Well, sure. Here's a trinary brown dwarf system [wikipedia.org]. Appears to be a total of 104.8 Jupiter masses. The smallest red dwarf [wikipedia.org] stars are about 78-80 Jupiter masses. So you would expect that some clump of gas and dust out there has organized itself into a red dwarf accompanied by large gas giant(s). But this seems to be the largest planet:star ratio EVER found and a good get for NGTS.

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