Massive Planet found Orbiting 2 of the Hottest Stars

A planet has been found orbiting in a double-star system so hot and Massive that some astronomers didn’t think a world could exist around it. The giant exoplanet outside our solar system was discovered orbiting b Centauri, a stellar pair situated 325 light-years from Earth in the Centaurus constellation.

This is the hottest and most Massive planet-hosting star system found so far. Astronomers were able to capture an image of the planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The binary star system is visible to us with the naked eye.

The giant planet, ten times as Massive as Jupiter, orbits the pair of stars at 100 times the distance between Jupiter and the sun. It’s one of the most Massive planets ever found. A study detailing the image and findings was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changed the picture about Massive stars as planet hosts. The giant b Centauri binary star, which is astronomically young at 15 million years old our sun is 4.6 billion years old — has at least six times the mass of our sun.

Until this discovery, no planets have been found around stars with more than three times the mass of our star. The stellar pair is also more than three times as hot as our sun, so it unleashes a tremendous amount of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.