Astronomers thought they knew how planets
A new planet, dubbed NGTS-1b, was discovered orbiting a small star 600 light years away.
The star is a red M-dwarf, the most common star in our universe. But until now, it wasn't believed that a gaseous planet of such a size, would ever exist orbiting this type of low-mass star.
"It was thought, before this discovery, that these stars are good at making small planets but didn't really produce large planets," Daniel Bayliss, of the University of Warwick's Astronomy and Astrophysics Group in the U.K., told CBC News.
"And that's why it was a surprise when we found this one."
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NGTS-1b is what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter," a giant planet as large as or bigger than our most massive planet. Though NGTS-1b is about the same size as Jupiter, it has 20 per cent less mass and is just three per cent the distance between Earth and the sun. The planet orbits its star every 2.6 Earth days.
But the star itself has a mass of just half of our sun.
