Scientists find huge planet that shouldn’t exist

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist.” When stars are formed, out of large clouds of gas and dust, that material sticks with the star as a disc that orbits around it. But science would suggest that the disc around the star in the new paper, known as LHS 3154, would not have enough material to make a planet so large. “The planet-forming disc around the low-mass star LHS 3154 is not expected to have enough solid mass to make this planet,” Mahadevan said. “But it’s out there, so now we need to reexamine our understanding of how planets and stars form.” The finding is reported in a new paper, ‘A Neptune-mass exoplanet in close orbit around a very low mass star challenges formation models’, published in Science.