Discovery Of Giant Planet Orbiting Tiny Star Challenges Theories On Planet Formation

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Star TOI-6894 is just like many in our galaxy, a small red dwarf, and only ~20% of the mass of our sun.

Like many small stars, it is not expected to provide suitable conditions for the formation and hosting of a large planet.

However, an international team of astronomers have found the unmistakable signature of a giant planet, called TOI-6894b, orbiting this tiny star. The work is published in Nature Astronomy .

This system has been discovered as part of a large-scale investigation of TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data, looking for giant planets around low-mass stars , led by Dr. Edward Bryant, who completed this work at the University of Warwick and at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

Dr. Edward Bryant, Warwick Astrophysics Prize Fellow and first author said, "I was very excited by this discovery.

I originally searched through TESS observations of more than 91,000 low-mass red-dwarf stars looking for giant planets.