Large Adult Planets<\/h2>
We already knew about one planet orbiting CI Tau: CI Tau b<\/a>. That planet’s 10 times the size of Jupiter, but whips around its star every nine Earth days. Jupiter, by comparison, makes it around our Sun only once every 12 years<\/a>.<\/p> Now, a new paper<\/a> published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/em> describes CI Tau b’s three colossal brothers.<\/p> A ring of dust and gas known as a “protoplanetary disk” surrounds CI Tau. The researchers aimed a network of Chilean radio telescopes at this disk and spotted telltale gaps that almost certainly mean that the little star has three more<\/em> massive planets. One is three times<\/span> the size of Jupiter, while the two others are only as big as Saturn. Only<\/em>.<\/em><\/p> Astronomers previously thought that mega gas planets formed slowly, over periods <\/strong>longer than CI Tau has been around. One of the researchers who discovered CI Tau’s planets, Farzana Meru, told NBC<\/em><\/a> that the huge gas balls upend that understanding.<\/p> Under the right circumstances, it appears, these planets can form far more quickly than we thought possible.<\/p> We’ll probably never make it out to CI Tau, which is 500 million light-years away. But for now, we’ll keep an eye peeled for more news about its brood of giant planets and anything they can tell us about the formation of the cosmos.<\/p> READ MORE:<\/strong> Record Breaker: 4 Huge Alien Planets Spotted Around Baby Star<\/a> [Space.com<\/em>]<\/p> More on exoplanets: Scientists Discover 3 New “Super-Earth” Exoplanets<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p> Excerpt from: A Star Is Born* *Two billion years ago. Continue reading Large Astronomy Shakeup.<\/h2>
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These New Planets Are Massive. So Is What They Could Teach Us.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"