BBC Sky at Night

The planetary systems that never grow up

There’s something strange about the star WISEA J080822.18-644357.3. And it’s not just the star’s extreme mouthful of a name. J0808 is an M-class, low-mass red dwarf star in the Carina association, over 330 lightyears away. It exhibits an extreme infrared excess – this means that the J0808 system is giving off far more thermal energy than

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