We bring you the Universe’s latest example of a star system we didn’t think should have a planet most definitely having a planet. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has imaged a planet orbiting a binary star system. The two stars have a combined mass greater than six times the mass of our Sun, and the planet is a massive ten times the mass of Jupiter.

This large world orbits at a very large distance: it is a hundred times further from its stars than Jupiter is from our Sun. In our solar system, this would put the planet out in the middle of the Kuiper Belt.

We are able to see this planet reasonably easily because the central stars are giving off so much light that the planet can then reflect back to us, and it’s those stars that make it so confusing to find a planet. When this system was young, those two stars were blasting their surroundings with amazing stellar winds and radiation, and it had been thought that protoplanets would get disrupted before they had a chance to grow. But it turns out that planets gonna form where planets gonna form, and that appears to be absolutely everywhere.

With larger and larger telescopes coming online in the next few years, it should become possible to start to make out features of this wide separated planet and learn more about what it means to be a planet in a system where the stars are so overpowering.

One of the basic rules of the universe is: big things have the potential to do highly energetic things. Those big stars had the potential to be the destroyers of worlds; they just happen to let at least that one planet survive.

More Information

MPIA press release

“A wide-orbit giant planet in the high-mass b Centauri binary system,” Markus Janson et al., 2021 December 8, Nature