A “puffy” new planet orbiting a small, cool star has been discovered 500 light years away from earth, by a team of scientists conducting research that could one day find new planets capable of hosting life.
Named HATS-6b, the new planet is challenging the current wisdom about how planets form.
It was discovered by an international group of scientists called the HAT South team, from the Australian National University, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute — along with an amateur astronomer in Perth known as TG Tan.
George Zhou from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics said HATS-6b was about the size of Jupiter and was orbiting very close to a small, sun-like star called HATS-6.
“That means this is a really big planet… orbiting a relatively small star,” he said.
“It’s quite hard to form these big planets around small stars.”
Mr Zhou said he believed the planet must have formed further out and migrated in.
“But our theories can’t explain how this happened,” he said.
Mr Zhou said HATS-6b is a “puffy” planet — meaning it is large, but not particularly dense.
“This planet is not as heavy as Jupiter, but it is as big as Jupiter. So it is quite puffed up,” he said.
“We’ve been able to measure the mass and the radius of this planet, which gives us the density. We know that the density is less than Saturn.”
To explain just how light Saturn is, Mr Zhou used a simple analogy.
