Giant exoplanet around tiny star challenges understanding of how planets form

An international team of researchers with participation from the University of Gottingen has discovered the first large gas giant orbiting a small star. The planet was found orbiting the nearby red dwarf star GJ 3512. This discovery challenges scientists' very understanding of how planets form: low-mass stars should have less available material to form planets.

Moreover, this new gas giant is on an eccentric orbit, which sug-gests the presence of another massive planet, which may have been ejected from the system in a chaotic interaction. The results were published in Science.

The Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Gottingen calibrated the data, a task that is fundamental to understanding the minute effect the motion of the planet or planets exert on a star. The Institute is also responsible for the analysis of the enormous amount of complex data sent from the observatory.

Every day, fresh information arrives at the institute and is converted into numbers that the CARMENES consorti-um scientists can then interpret as stellar motion. To discover the planets, the astronomers used the Dop-pler technique, which monitors the back-and-forth motion of a star when it is orbited by one or more plan-ets. The star was so faint that it almost did not make it into the list of targets. However, once the data had been analysed, it was clear that its behaviour suggested something very interesting.

The star's velocity was changing very rapidly and consistently, indicating the presence of at least one massive companion, an unusual feature for a red dwarf. In addition, the irregular orbit of the newly discovered planet suggests the possibility of an earlier collision with another planet meaning there could be a wandering world in the galac-tic void.

"As their name indicates, red dwarfs emit most of their light in the red and near infrared parts of the spec-trum. CARMENES was designed to make optimal use of all the light wavelengths where the stars are brighter," explains Professor Ansgar Reiners, from the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Got-tingen. "Despite the fact that optical high-resolution and stabilised spectrographs have existed for a while, for example HARPS, near-infrared ones represent a new technology."

Professor Stefan Dreizler, also from the Institute for Astrophysics, added, "Although we know about 4,000 planets outside the solar system, there are still discoveries which bring new surprises. The planet around GJ 3512 is one of those."

Gottingen is the lead university of the DFG research group "Blue Planets around Red Stars" whose pur-pose is scientific exploitation of the CARMENES data.

Research Report: "A giant exoplanet orbiting a very-low-mass star challenges planet formation models"

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A planet that should not exist
Berm, Switzerland (SPX) Sep 27, 2019
Astronomers detected a giant planet orbiting a small star. The planet has much more mass than theoretical models predict. While this surprising discovery was made by a Spanish-German team at an observatory in southern Spain, researchers at the University of Bern studied how the mysterious exoplanet might have formed. The red dwarf GJ 3512 is located 30 light-years from us. Although the star is only about a tenth of the mass of the Sun, it possesses a giant planet - an unexpected observation. ... read more