The planet that scientists refer to as the “cosmic monster” takes up to 14 years to orbit its parent star and has temperatures that can drop to -100 degrees Celsius.
According to SciTech Daily, a research team led by Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland) discovered this giant exoplanet using data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope located in Texas, USA, and the Galileo Telescope based in the Canary Islands, Spain.
“Cosmic monster planet” recently discovered around star HD 118203 in the Ursa Major constellation – (Photo: UMK).
For nearly 20 years, the parent star HD 118203 of this planet has been known to have a fairly large planet orbiting it.
This is a gas giant with a mass twice that of Jupiter, orbiting its parent star in a narrow orbit that takes just 6 Earth days. However, some signs indicate it may not be alone.
Thus, they searched and found the “cosmic monster,” a world with a mass up to 11 times that of Jupiter, equivalent to about 3,500 Earths combined.
It is classified as a “cold super-Jupiter,” also a gas giant, with temperatures that can plummet to -100 degrees Celsius.
This frigid temperature is largely due to the fact that the newly discovered planet is located very far from its parent star: It is 6 astronomical units (AU) away, which is six times the distance from the Sun to Earth.
Although the two planets in the HD 118203 system belong to the Ursa Major constellation and orbit at significant distances from each other, they still interact gravitationally quite tightly, maintaining the stability of the system over millions of years.
Only a little over a dozen star systems similar to HD 118203 are known, so this new discovery will provide scientists with a “laboratory” to study how extremely large planets form in the universe.
The research on the “cosmic monster” was recently published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
