The massive planet LHS 3154b orbits a star much smaller than Earth’s sun, and its discovery could upend everything we think we know about how solar systems form.

Planet LHS 3154b is 13 times more massive than Earth and its star is 9 times smaller than the sun.

Scientists have discovered a planet that is way too big for its tiny star. Its existence could upend everything we thought we knew about how solar systems form, researchers say.

The ultra-cool dwarf star, named LHS 3154, lies 51 light-years from our solar system and is about nine times less massive than our sun. In contrast, its planet, LHS 3154b, is 13 times more massive than Earth. That sort of cosmic mismatch is previously unheard of — the astronomical equivalent of finding a watermelon on a grapevine.

“We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist,” study co-author Suvrath Mahadevan, an astronomer at Penn State , said in a statement.

Mahadevan and his team found the system using an instrument known as the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. HPF is designed to detect (relatively) cool stars like LHS 3154, as the planets orbiting them are more likely to have water on their surfaces. However, the researchers weren’t expecting to find an oversized planet orbiting one.

While LHS 3154b is far from the most massive exoplanet discovered so far (that honor likely goes to the gas giant HAT-P-67 b, which has a radius about twice that of Jupiter), its size relative to its star is record-breaking, and the discovery challenges the current scientific understanding of how planetary systems form. When a new star emerges from a cloud of cosmic dust, the rest of the material in that cloud becomes a disk around the baby sun. This disk of dust, gas and pebbles then begins to condense into increasingly large balls of rock, which eventually snowball into planets.

But LHS 3154b is so large that researchers think it would require about 10 times the amount of dust that’s estimated to have been present around its newly formed star. Based on this discrepancy, it seems likely that such systems are extremely rare. The researchers hope that further analysis will reveal just how the planet got so big — and why its star is so small in comparison.

“This discovery really drives home the point of just how little we know about the universe,” Mahadevan said.

The scientists published their findings Nov. 30 in the journal Science.

https://www.livescience.com/space/exoplanets/enormous-planet-discovered-around-tiny-star-could-break-our-understanding-of-solar-system-formation

so ends safe generalizations from the Copernican Revolution

transition said:

so ends safe generalizations from the Copernican Revolution

and whiles reads, forgives me for relevance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos
“Aristarchus of Samos (/ˌærəˈstɑːrkəs/; Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος ὁ Σάμιος, Aristarkhos ho Samios; c. 310 – c. 230 BCE) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day.

He was a student of Strato of Lampsacus, who was the third head of the Peripatetic School in Greece. According to Ptolemy, during Aristarchus’ time there, he observed the summer solstice of 280 BCE. Along with his contributions to the heliocentric model, as reported by Vitruvius, he created two separate sundials: one that is a flat disc; and one hemispherical.

Aristarchus was influenced by the concept presented by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BCE) of a fire at the center of the universe, but Aristarchus identified the “central fire” with the Sun and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.

Like Anaxagoras before him, Aristarchus suspected that the stars were just other bodies like the Sun, albeit farther away from Earth. His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Nicolaus Copernicus knew about the possibility that Aristarchus had a ‘moving Earth’ theory, although it is unlikely that Copernicus was aware that it was a heliocentric theory.

Aristarchus estimated the sizes of the Sun and Moon as compared to Earth’s size. He also estimated the distances from the Earth to the Sun and Moon. He is considered one of the greatest astronomers of antiquity along with Hipparchus…”

> The massive planet LHS 3154b orbits a star much smaller than Earth’s sun, and its discovery could upend everything we think we know about how solar systems form.

I’ve been saying for ages that hot Jupiters are failed binary stars – same radial distribution.
None of Kepler’s hot Jupiters formed by cold accretion like our own solar system.

This new one just confirms again what I’ve been saying all along.

mollwollfumble said:

> The massive planet LHS 3154b orbits a star much smaller than Earth’s sun, and its discovery could upend everything we think we know about how solar systems form.

I’ve been saying for ages that hot Jupiters are failed binary stars – same radial distribution.
None of Kepler’s hot Jupiters formed by cold accretion like our own solar system.

This new one just confirms again what I’ve been saying all along.

That makes sense not enough mass to start fusion