A team led by a University of Arizona graduate student has found a new planet that is sets a new record for most distant orbit from a star.
Astronomy graduate student Vanessa Bailey is at the head of an international group of researchers, who discovered the giant planet orbiting around a star outside of our solar system.
The planet’s orbit is 650 times further from that star than the the Earth is from the sun.
This discovery means some scientific theories on how planets form may now have to be rewritten.
“When we think about planet formation theories, they’re always based on being able to form planets in our own solar system because that’s mostly what we know,” Bailey said. “There, really, aren’t good theories yet for how you can form planets so much farther away than anything in our own solar system.”
The newly discovered planet is relatively young at 13 million years old.
It is also massive, being more than 11 times the size of our solar system's largest planet, Jupiter.
It’s the first planet outside of our solar system discovered by UA researchers.
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