Astronomers have discovered a transiting exoplanet, named IRAS 04125+2902b, orbiting a 3 million-year-old, 0.7 solar mass protostar in the Taurus Molecular Cloud.
Artistic interpretation of the IRAS 04125+2902 system. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt & K. Miller, Caltech & IPAC.
The radius of IRAS 04125+2902b is 0.96 the radius of Jupiter, and the mass is
This giant exoplanet, also known as TIDYE-1b, orbits its parent star. IRAS 04125+2902once every 8.83 days.
The system is located approximately 522 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
it is part of Taurus Molecular Cloudan active star nursery with hundreds of newborn stars.
“IRAS 04125+2902b casts doubt on previous theories about the rate of planet formation,” said astronomer Madison Barber of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues.
“While Earth took 10 to 20 million years to form, this exoplanet emerged in just 3 million years and orbits its star almost every week.”
“When we discover planets like this, we can look back into the past and get a glimpse of how planets formed.”
First detected by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), IRAS 04125+2902b is the newest known transiting planet.
The discovery sheds light on potential differences between our solar system and planetary systems that host nearby giant planets, such as IRAS 04125+2902b, and provides greater context about our own cosmic neighborhood. We provide.
Additionally, because the planet is still within a disk of nascent material, scientists will be able to study its formation up close, opening up new avenues of research.
Follow-up research will analyze how the planet's atmosphere compares to the surrounding disk material, providing clues about its journey into a compressed orbit.
Astronomers will also investigate whether IRAS 04125+2902b is still growing through accretion of material, or whether it may have lost its upper atmosphere to its host star.
“Planets typically form from flat disks of dust and gas, which is why the planets in our solar system are arranged in a 'pancake-flat' arrangement,” says the Young World Institute's said lead researcher and astronomer Dr. Andrew Mann. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“But here the disk is tilted and out of alignment with both the planet and its star. This is a surprising twist that calls into question our current understanding of how planets form.”
This finding is reported in the following article: paper Published in today's magazine nature.
_____
MG Barber others. 2024. A giant planet passing through a 3 million meter protostar with a misaligned disk. nature 635, 574-577; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08123-3
Source: www.sci.news
