A new study suggests that a planet 336 light-years from Earth could help scientists unravel the mystery surrounding a supposedly large “New Planet” hiding on the outskirts of our solar system.
With the help of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a huge Jupiter-like planet that orbits far away from its host stars and the visible disk of debris.
While the search for a new planet continues, this discovery of the exoplanet, known as HD 106906 b, is evidence that these strange orbits are possible, according to a statement from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This system makes a potentially unique comparison to our solar system,” the author in the study, published in The Astronomical Journal, Meiji Nguyen of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement to the space flight center.
“It is very widely separated from its host stars in an eccentric and highly misaligned orbit, as is the prediction of the New Planet. This makes us wonder how these planets formed and evolved to end up in their current configuration.”
The system where this gas giant resides is 15 million years old, according to the space flight center report, which suggests that the New Planet (if it exists) could have formed very early in the evolution of our 4,600-solar system. millions of years.
“It’s like we have a time machine for our own planetary system that goes back 4.6 billion years to see what may have happened when our young solar system was dynamically active and everything was moving and rearranging,” said team member Paul Kalas statement at the space flight center.
Scientists using NASA’s upcoming James Webb space telescope to obtain data about the exoplanet to understand it in more detail, the space flight center reported.
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