THE PLANET THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST

You would think that a planet which is 11 times as massive as Jupiter – itself the largest planet in the Solar System – would be very easy to spot. But that’s not always the case. If the method of discovery isn’t quite good enough, then it’s always going to be much more difficult to find something, even if it’s hiding in plain sight. This can lead to theories that turn out to be incorrect, and that’s what recently came to light when an exoplanet suddenly popped into view during a wide-ranging sky survey. Before this happened, some scientists firmly believed that planets couldn’t form around stars that were more than three times as big as the Sun. But that was primarily because no one had ever found any that did. They have now.

Late in 2021, astronomers simply couldn’t believe their eyes. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) had captured an image of a planet orbiting the two-star system b Centauri. It looked huge, and indeed it was, for this exoplanet has been shown to be a whopping 11 times as massive as Jupiter. It’s also