Wednesday, November 1, 2017

This Planet...

...is too big to be explained by current planetary formation theory. It's not so much that NGST-1b is that big. It isn't. It's 1.33 the radius of Jupiter, which is big, but...not beyond the bounds of possibility, and it's light, only 0.88 percent of Jupiter's mass.

No, the problem is that its primary, NGST-1, is rather on the small side. It's an M-dwarf, half the size of the sun. Which means this is a planet almost the quarter of the size of its star.

By our current theories, that just can't happen. So now we have to find where the theories are wrong.

Again.

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