Skip to main content

‘Monster’ Planet Discovery Challenges Formation Theory

Artist’s illustration of a "hot Jupiter". Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss


A new research presents the discovery of NGTS-1b, a hot-Jupiter transiting an early M-dwarf host in a P~2.6 days orbit discovered as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS).

The planet has a mass of M~0.8 M(jupiter) making it the most massive planet ever discovered transiting an M-dwarf. NGTS-1b is the third transiting giant planet found around an M-dwarf, reinforcing the notion that close-in gas giants can form and migrate similar to the known population of hot Jupiters around solar type stars.

The existence of the 'monster' planet, 'NGTS-1b', challenges theories of planet formation which state that a planet of this size could not be formed around 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.

Such massive planets were not thought to exist around such small stars. The challenge now is to find out how common these types of planets are in the Galaxy.

M-dwarf stars as planetary hosts are of high interest. Two important recent discoveries in the field of exoplanets relate to planets orbiting M-dwarfs: Proxima Centauri and Trappist-1.

The  low  intrinsic  luminosity  of  M-dwarfs also means that the habitable zone is very close to the host star and therefore it is much easier to detect potential habitable  planets  around  these  stars, compared  to  their  more massive counterparts. Finally, M-dwarfs are the most populous  stars  in  the  Galaxy and hence understanding planet formation and planet frequency around these low mass stars greatly enhances our knowledge of the full population of planets in the Galaxy.

The  discovery  of  NGTS-1b  demonstrates  the  capability  of NGTS  to  probe  early  M-dwarfs  for  transiting  planets. In the full course of the survey, enough early M-dwarfs will be monitored to allow us to provide statistics for  these  host  stars  such  as  the  frequency  of  hot  Jupiters around early M-dwarfs.

Resources


 NGTS-1b: A hot Jupiter transiting an M-dwarf - (arXiv)

‘Monster’ Planet Discovery Challenges Formation Theory

Next Post



Etichette:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE HITCHCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE LOCAL SUPERCLUSTER

Image: Virgo Supercluster. Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin The Virgo Supercluster is a region with a diameter of 33 megaparsecs (~1000 times larger the Milky Way's diameter) containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters.
Post a Comment
Read more

CONTAMINATION BY SUPERNOVAE IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Alexandra Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF) Only a small amount of the supernovae products remains trapped within globular clusters and this "catch" only occurs in the most massive cases (mass cluster ≥ 10^6 solar masses).
Post a Comment
Read more

Boulevard of Broken Rings

Credit: ESO/Perrot This Picture illustrates the remarkable capabilities of SPHERE (the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument), a planet-hunting instrument mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile: It shows a series of broken rings of dust around a nearby star. These concentric rings are located in the inner region of the debris disc surrounding a young star named HD 141569A, which sits some 370 light-years away from us. In this image we see what is known as a transition disc, a short-lived stage between the protoplanetary phase, when planets have not yet formed, and a later time when planets have coalesced, leaving the disc populated only by any remaining - and predominantly dusty - debris. What we see here are structures formed of dust, revealed for the first time in near-infrared light by SPHERE - at a high enough resolution to capture remarkable detail! The area shown in this image has a diameter of just 200 times the Earth–Sun distan...
Post a Comment
Read more