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A Giant Planet and a Small Star Are Shaking Up Conventional Cosmological Theory


A giant gas planet comparable in size to Saturn exists around a small red dwarf star. The discovery is beyond the scope of conventional astronomy theory, and is making experts reconsider conventional notions of planet formation.

The signal was picked up by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite(TESS), an observation instrument launched by NASA to hunt for planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system. This makes TOI-6894 “the lowest mass star known to date to host such a planet,” said Edward Bryant, Astrophysics Prize Fellow at the University of Warwick, in a press statement. The widely accepted planetary formation model, the “ core-accumulation theory, ” proposes that a ring of dust and rocks—known as protoplanetary disk—forms around a star, and that materials in this disk then gather together to form the cores of planets.

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