NEW YORK: Researchers at the Australian National University have discovered a strange Jupiter-sized exoplanet orbiting a small and cool star some 500 light years away and this planet-star duo is challenging current theories and ideas about planet formations.
With over 4,000 candidate planets already spotted by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope out of which over 1,000 have been already verified as exoplanets, scientists have an understanding of how planets are formed around their host stars.
However, ANU researchers say that the discovery of the latest exoplanet around its host star dubbed HATS-6, which is classed as an M-dwarf, is baffling as current theories can help explain why the giant planet is orbiting the star so closely. Though M-dwarfs are one of the most numerous types of stars in galaxy, they are not well understood owing to their low visibility because of cool temperature, which makes them dim.
HATS-6 emits only one twentieth of the light of our sun, which makes it very dim for study purposes. The giveaway that the faint star had a planet circling it was a dip in its brightness caused as the planet passed in front of the star, observed by small robotic telescopes including telescopes at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory.
