(NLDO) - The planet that scientists call a "space monster" takes up to 14 years to orbit its mother star and has a temperature of -100 degrees Celsius.
According to SciTech Daily, a research team led by Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland) discovered the giant exoplanet thanks to data from the Hobby-Eberly telescope located in Texas, USA and the Galileo telescope located in the Canary Islands, Spain.
"Monster planet" has just been discovered around star HD 118203 in the constellation Ursa Major - Photo: UMK
For nearly 20 years, the planet's parent star HD 118203 has been known to have a fairly large planet orbiting it.
It is a gas planet with twice the mass of the solar system's giant Jupiter, orbiting its parent star in a tight orbit that takes just six Earth days. But there are signs that it is not alone.
So they searched and found the "monster planet", a world with a mass up to 11 times that of Jupiter, or about 3,500 Earths combined.
It is classified as a "cold super Jupiter", which is also a gas planet and temperatures there can drop to -100 degrees Celsius.
This coldness comes largely from the fact that the newly discovered planet is very far from its parent star: 6 astronomical units (AU), which is 6 times farther than the Sun-Earth distance.
Although the two planets of the star system named HD 118203 in the constellation Ursa Major orbit very far apart, they still interact gravitationally quite closely, not destabilizing the system over the scale of millions of years.
There are only a dozen known star systems like HD 118203, so the new discovery will give scientists a great "laboratory" to study how extremely large planets form in the universe.
Research on the "monster planet" has just been published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Source: https://nld.com.vn/hanh-tinh-bang-3500-trai-dat-xuat-hien-giua-chom-sao-dai-hung-196240918092212287.htm
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