Just 285 light-years from Earth lies a small, inconspicuous reddish star that astronomers have classified as TOI-5205. At first glance, it’s just one of the hundreds of billions of red dwarfs in our galaxy, nothing particularly interesting. Now, however, scientists have found something that sets this system apart from all known systems.
When we look up at the night sky, we will not see a single red dwarf, even though it is the most numerous group of stars. Although there are a lot of them, they are, first of all, small and shine relatively weakly. Moreover, even our nearest star other than the Sun, Proxima Centauri, only 4 light-years away, is still too small and too faint to see with the naked eye.
Stars of this type have a mass of 8 to 60 percent. sun block. Its brightness ranges from 0.01 to 10 percent. Sun rise. Considering that 80% of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, they should be studied until we hope to at least learn more about our stellar surroundings.
wait what is this?
By observing the aforementioned star TOI-5205, astronomers have found a planet in its neighbourhood. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. We already know that most of the stars in our galaxy likely have planets. In fact, even the closest star to us – Proxima Centauri – also has its own planet, or even several planets.
However, TOI-5205b, as a catalog number has been given for a new world, is not a typical planet. First, red dwarfs do not have gas giants in their neighborhood. Secondly, planets revolving around stars are usually much smaller than them.
However, TOI-5205 is different. Not only is the planet orbiting the star a gas giant, it’s also surprisingly large. As the researchers point out in their latest paper, the star itself is only about four times the size of Jupiter, yet it orbits a planet similar in size to Jupiter. The problem is that all models that describe planet formation in the universe preclude the formation of such large planets.
How did this unusual arrangement happen? Astronomers don’t know yet. The only thing we do know is that such a system already exists.
The problem is that planets are formed from protoplanetary clouds surrounding a young star. For a planet like TOI-5205b to form, it takes at least ten Earth masses of material to form its core, and then the massive amounts of gas that could be collected by that core to form a gas giant. However, the embarrassment is that a star like TOI-5205 could not have this much material in its protoplanetary disk. Therefore, there are many questions about the origin of this unusual planetary system.
Fortunately, from the perspective of an observer on Earth, the TOI-5205 system is arranged so that the massive planet passes in front of its star each time it orbits, allowing us to observe its transit. This, in turn, means that in the coming years scientists will aim at this system larger telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope. There is a chance that we will learn a lot more about the star and the planet than we currently know, and perhaps we will be able to solve the mystery of this planet.
