Researchers have identified a young star with four Jupiter and Saturn-sized planets in orbit around it, the first time that so many massive planets have been detected in such a young system. The system has also set a new record for the most extreme range of orbits yet observed: the outermost planet is more than a thousand times further from the star than the innermost one, which raises interesting questions about how such a system might have formed.
To answer significant questions about planetary systems, such as whether our solar system is a rare phenomenon or if life exists on planets other than Earth, NASA should lead a large direct imaging mission – an advanced space telescope – capable of studying Earth-like exoplanets orbiting stars similar to the sun, says a new congressionally mandated report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
“It’s amazing to think that the enigmatic intermediate-size exoplanets could be water worlds with vast amounts of water. Hopefully atmosphere observations in the future–of thick steam atmospheres—can support or refute the new findings,” said Professor Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and deputy science director of the recently-launched TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission, which will search for exoplanets.
“Most of the building blocks we have looked at in other planetary systems have a composition broadly similar to that of the Earth”, said Dr Siyi Xu of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, who was presenting the research at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston.
Exoplanets, planets in other solar systems, can orbit very close to their host stars. When the host star is much hotter than the sun, the exoplanet becomes as hot as a star. The hottest “ultra-hot” planet was discovered last year by American astronomers. Today, an international team led by researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), who collaborated with theoreticians from the University of Bern (UNIBE), Switzerland, discovered the presence of iron and titanium vapors in the atmosphere of this planet. The detection of these heavy metals was made possible by the surface temperature of the planet, which reaches more than 4000 degrees.
