many The stars in the Milky Way are small, dim red dwarfs – the sun of standard size and mass is much smaller. TOI-6894 is TOI-6894 far from the earth.
Astronomers previously believed that such a star would not be able to circulate a large planet because it accounts for only 20% of the sun’s mass, meaning that its planetary system (which will be produced with the material around the star) will not contain enough mass to form a huge body like Saturn or Jupiter.
However, when TOI-6894 was observed, an international team of researchers discovered a significant transit signal, which temporarily reduced the star brightness caused by the planet’s passing through it. The newly discovered planet, known as TOI-6894b, blocks 17% of the star’s light, indicating that the planet is quite large. The signal is received by the Transiting Exoplanetary Movie (TESS), an observation tool initiated by NASA to find planetary rotation stars outside the solar system.
This makes TOI-6894 “the lowest mass star to date with such a planet,” said Edward Bryant, a researcher at Warwick University’s Astrophysics Awards. This discovery seems to upend traditional theories about how planets form. “This discovery will be the cornerstone of understanding the extremes of giant planet formation,” Bryant said.
Astronomers at University College London and Warwick University, as part of a global collaboration with Chile, the United States and Europe, browsed data on approximately 91,000 Red Dwarf stars and then observed before Earth’s TOI-6894b was discovered. The properties of TOI-6894b were then elucidated by other observations made with other telescopes. According to these, TOI-6894b has a slightly larger radius than Saturn’s, but its mass is only half that of the ring giant. Its density is only 0.33 g/cm³, indicating that it is an extended gas planet.
TOI-6894 has nearly 40% record of planets of this size than the smallest star before. This fact constitutes a serious contradiction with the conventional theory of planet formation.
The widely accepted model of planet formation, the “core energy storage theory” proposes that dust and rock rings (called proto-disks) form around a star, and the materials in that disk gather together to form the planet’s core. After activation in this way, large gas planets then accumulate gas around the core, becoming huge. However, if the mass of a star is very small, the mass of its original chart is also often very small. In this case, the nucleus required to form giant planets does not grow.
Based on this theory, it is estimated that the solid matter required to form TOI-6894b is more than 120 times that required to the earth. However, the observed disks surrounding the star TOI-6894 are only 58 times the mass of the Earth. This increases the possibility that there is an alternative planetary formation mechanism.
