BIZARRE NEW PLANET IS LARGEST KNOWN ROCKY WORLD, 40 TIMES AS MASSIVE AS EARTH
About 730 light-years away, not so far on the scale of our galaxy, an utterly bizarre planet orbits a sun-like star called TOI-849b. It’s big, dense, and tightly tethered to its home star, this planet is unlike anything astronomers have yet seen. Further observations of the host star’s gravitational wobble determined that while TOI-849b is roughly as wide as Neptune, it is at least twice as massive. Explaining how such a world emerged challenges what scientists understand about how planets grow. One possibility is that TOI-849b cleared a gap in the gas around its star, ran out of material to collect, and stalled. Another possibility is that TOI-849b is the husk of a formerly huge planet that somehow lost its atmosphere. A third scenario is that cataclysms during the planet’s early years both bulked up the rocky planet core and stripped away its atmosphere. “We can already say that planets like TOI-849b are rare, but nevertheless they do exist, and now we have to find out how, and why,” Ravit Helled says.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/07/bizarre-planet-largest-known-rocky-world-40-times-as-massive-as-earth/
