Centauri b should not exist at all, or researchers know less about how planets form than they did previously. The discovery of a giant planet in the giant star system Centaurus B is an equally profound mystery. Astronomers have never tracked an exoplanet in such a hot and massive star system. A team led by Markus Jansson from Stockholm University reports on the discovery In the specialized magazine “Nature”.
There is a risk of confusion with the b Centauri star system because of the name: This is not ours The neighboring star system Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in the constellation Centauri, is still around Beta Centauri, a double system with a white-blue giant. The b Centauri star system is a binary star system about 325 light-years away, which, when viewed from Earth, is closer to the edge of the constellation Centaur and can only be observed in the southern sky. But one of its stars is huge: b Centauri A, as a class B star, is three times hotter than our sun. The b Centauri double star system has a total mass of six to ten solar masses.
An extreme exoplanet in a star system just as much
There is a kind of image of the newly discovered exoplanet b Centauri b – the first “b” belongs to the designation of the star, the second refers to the planet itself – there is a kind of image: the team around Markus Janson noticed it directly in the recordings that – which Sphere Ultra Large Endoscope VLT Recorded by the European Southern Observatory ESO. Later, researchers were able to discover the planet in 20-year-old archival data.
© ESO / Janson et al. (excerpt)
A star system with an exoplanet | The newly discovered exoplanet b Centauri b directly observed here is marked with an arrow. The binary star system b Centauri is located in the upper left corner as a large, bright object. Loops around visual artifacts.
Just like its massive central stars orbiting b Centauri b, the exoplanet itself is an extreme representative of its kind: it has a mass ten times greater. like Jupiter It is in an orbit 100 times farther from its twin stars from Jupiter than from the Sun. Therefore, scientists are of the opinion that it is unlikely that it happened in the previously known way. Alternative scenarios also fail because binary stars are too dense and too bright for planets to form in their vicinity and later move away. Apparently there were other mechanisms at work. Janson’s research group suggests that b Centauri b came from another star system and was captured by b Centauri. “It would be a great job to see how it might happen. It’s still a mystery right now,” says Janson.
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