A baby exoplanet is raising many questions: it is gaseous but twice as dense as Earth

The mystery of its composition and formation has baffled astronomers.

Many Are the issues they have to be valued when planets similar to the one that stars in this news are discovered, in the same way that it happened when we were learning which are the planets of the Solar System and their distance from Earth. understand your sourcethe place in which they are, know their dough or the composition of your atmosphere are some of the questions that start his study, although sometimes the why is what throws up the most enigmas to the privileged brains of astronomers.

NASA reveals the secrets of hell exoplanets, with temperatures so high that rocks evaporate

It’s a newborn, but it’s already giving astronomers around the world headaches

It has been a group of scientists, led by Olga Zakhozhay, who have discovered a exoplanet which they have named as HD114082b, as they have published in the digital journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Only 15% of exoplanets, we have discovered more than 5,000, are gaseous. On this occasion, this celestial body has a mass that is almost double of ours, that of Landbeing almost as big as Jupiter. Olga Zakhozhay assures that:

Compared to currently accepted models, HD 114082 b is two to three times as dense as these young gas giants, only 15 million years old, tend to be.

Conceptual recreation of the gaseous exoplanet that has astronomers busy. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

To understand these datayou have to go to the two theories most accepted in the formation of planets. On the one hand, there is talk of ‘core growth’, in which a core of rocky material gains enough mass to attract gas by gravitational force, which will gradually add hydrogen and helium to form the planet. Second, there is the theory known as ‘disk instability’which consists of dense gas fields, which are gravitationally unstable, collapsing to end up forming a planet without a rocky core.

These models do not seem to finish convincing astronomers in the case of the exoplanet HD 114082 b, but as says Ralf Launhardtco-author of the study and member of the Max Planck Institute:

All we can say is that we still don’t understand the formation of giant planets very well. Compared to current models, HD 114082 b is very small for its mass. Either it has an unusually large solid core, or the models are wrong and we have underestimated the rate by which the gas giants can cool down, or perhaps both are correct.

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