A giant planet is discovered by Astronomers which is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a 2 million years old star about 450 light years from Earth. This planet is contradicting a long-standing idea that larger planets take much time to form.
“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull from Rice University in the US.
“That’s been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation,” said Johns-Krull.
CI Tau is the planet that is eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits the Earth in a group of stars called Tarus said researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, NASA and Northern Arizona University.
Johns-Krull says that the Earth and the Sun are more than 4 billion years old and 3300 plus catalogue which includes older and some younger than Earth from exoplanets. Stars that are so young are also active with visual outbursts and dimming that can make it appear.
CI Tau orbits the star once in every nine days. The planet-hunting technique relies on slight variations in the velocity of a star with the gravitational pull exerted by planets which are faint to observe directly with a telescope.
“This result is unique because it demonstrates that a giant planet can form so rapidly that the remnant gas and dust from which the young star formed, surrounding the system in a Frisbee-like disk, is still present,” said Lisa Prato of Lowell Observatory in the US.
“Giant planet formation in the inner part of this disk, where CI Tau b is located, will have a profound impact on the region where smaller terrestrial planets are also potentially forming,” said Prato.