A planet spotted 336 light-years from Earth could help scientists unravel the mystery surrounding an alleged large “Planet Nine” lurking in the outskirts of our solar system, a new study suggests.
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disk.
Although the search for planet nine continues, this discovery of the exoplanet – known as HD 106906 b – is proof that such strange orbits are possible, a press release from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reported.
“This system draws a potentially unique comparison to our solar system,” said the study’s author, who appeared in The Astronomical Journal, Meiji Nguyen of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement to the space center.
“It is very far from its guest stars in an eccentric and highly aligned orbit, just like the prediction for Planet Nine. This begs the question of how these planets formed and evolved to get into their current configuration.”
The system in which this gas giant resides is 15 million years old, the space center report said, suggesting that planet Nine – if it exists – would have formed very early in the evolution of our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system.
“It’s like we have a time machine for our own planetary system going back 4.6 billion years to see what may have happened when our young solar system was dynamically active and everything was pushed around and rearranged,” team member Paul Kalas said in a statement. to the space flight center.
Scientists using NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope plan to get data about the exoplanet to understand it in more detail, the spaceflight center reported.
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