NASA’s TESS finds massive exoplanet with mass of 13 Jupiters
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Our vast and expanding universe is filled with diverse and odd cosmic objects. And there are millions of them just waiting to be discovered.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is one such mission dedicated to searching for planets beyond our solar system.
Astronomers have stumbled upon a cosmic cannonball while combing through the wealth of data generated by the TESS.
Surprisingly, the exoplanet has a mass of nearly 13 Jupiters. “It is one of the most massive and densest transiting giant planets known to date,” states the research paper.
This discovery challenges our current understanding of planetary formation.
The bizarre exoplanet
TOI-4603b was studied by a team of astronomers led by Akanksha Khandelwal of the Physical Research Laboratory in India.
According to TESS data, the radius of this exoplanet is 1.042 times that of Jupiter. The exoplanet revolves around a star 730 light-years away in a 7.25-day orbit.
The team was able to decode the mass of TOI-4603b using radial velocity measurements, which is likely to be 12.89 times that of Jupiter.
Astronomers believe that the amount of mass that a planet can have is theoretically limited. The team hypothesizes that it belongs to a particular category of planets whose formation and evolution are still unknown to astronomers.
The team notes that a value between 10 to 13 Jupiters is estimated to be the upper mass limit for a planet. The paper adds that TOI-4603b is “a valuable addition to the population of less than five massive close-in giant planets in the high-mass planet and low-mass brown dwarf overlapping region that is further required for understanding the processes responsible for their formation.”
Simply put, this planet could be on a line between brown dwarfs and planets. Brown dwarfs are objects that have masses between those of giant planets such as Jupiter and the smallest stars.
This world may shape our understanding of the formation of brown dwarfs and giant planets.
The results are available on the preprint server arXiv, and the paper has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters.
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