I love when we directly image exoplanets. It’s an amazing accomplishment and truly shows how we continue to push the limits of our technology. And sometimes, those images reveal planets that make very little sense. Such is the case with YSES 2b, a giant planet about 360 light-years away and orbiting at a distance 110 times farther out from its star than the Earth is from the Sun. That’s also about 20 times farther than Jupiter orbits. And when we say giant, we mean it’s six times heavier than Jupiter. 

So what, Beth? Maybe the star is huge! Nope. This star resembles our own Sun but much younger; only 14 million years old. All of these numbers led a team of astronomers to try and understand just how and where this planet formed. Large planets need a lot of material, and we don’t find that much in the accretion disks of protoplanetary systems at that kind of distance. It’s also not heavy enough to have been formed from a gravitational instability in the protoplanetary disk. This means it’s possible that it formed close in and somehow migrated out, but that requires the influence of another planet, and that planet has yet to be found. The team is going to continue to look for that sibling planet as well as other gaseous planets around young, sun-like stars. We’ll bring you their findings here on Daily Space.

More Information

Leiden University press release

“Discovery of a directly imaged planet to the young solar analog YSES 2,” Alexander J. Bohn et al., 2021 April 19, Astronomy & Astrophysics