Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Queen’s stars find sunthing special...
Planet size of Jupiter discovered
RESEARCHERS from Queen’s University are among a team of scientists who have discovered a planet the size of Jupiter.
Dr Christopher Watson led the group from Northern Ireland which teamed up with boffins from around the world on the project.
They have now reported finding the unusual planet NGTS-1B – the largest planet compared to the size of its companion star ever discovered in the universe.
NGTS-1B is a gas giant 600 light years away and orbits a small star with a radius and mass half that of our Sun.
Its existence challenges planet formation theories that a planet of this size could not be formed by such a small star.
According to these theories, small stars can readily form rocky planets but do not gather enough material together to form Jupiter-sized ones. It is as hot and at least as large as Jupiter, but with around 20% less mass.
It is very close to its star – just 3% of the distance between Earth and the Sun – and orbits it every 2.6 days, meaning a year on NGTS-1B lasts two and a half days. The temperature is around 530°C.
Dr Watson said: “Queen’s has played a pivotal role in the development of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) – the instrument that found the planet and after which the planet is named.
“Sat in the harsh environment of the Atacama Desert it has been scouring the sky looking for alien worlds and the very first one it has found has challenged our preconceptions of where planets can exist.” Dr Daniel Bayliss, from the University of Warwick and lead author of the research, added: “The discovery of NGTS-1B was a complete surprise to us – such massive planets were not thought to exist around such small stars.
“This is the first exoplanet we have found with our new NGTS facility and we are already challenging the received wisdom of how planets form. Our challenge is to now find out how common these types of planets are in the galaxy, and with the new NGTS facility we are well-placed to do just that.”
The researchers spotted the planet using a wide-field observing facility made of a compact ensemble of telescopes, designed to search for transiting planets on bright stars.
The planet orbits a red M-dwarf – the most common type of star in the universe, leading to the possibility there could be more of these waiting to be found by the NGTS survey.
Dr Katja Poppenhaeger from Queen’s University Belfast also worked on the project. She said: “M-dwarfs are the most numerous stars in the universe, so we really need to understand what the planets around them look like. NGTS-1B is an important piece of the puzzle.”