Most exoplanets discovered in recent decades orbit stars roughly the size of the Sun. Some are a little larger and others are much smaller. Planets have been discovered around pulsars, the end products of supernovae. As a result, astronomers hope that planets will be found around giant stars that will one day explode into supernovae. Two of these planets were recently discovered, and the whole thing looks like a blown-up version of our solar system. The star in question is called μ2 Sco, which is part of the Scorpio-Sagittarius union. This is a group of young stars, less than 20 million years old. Among them, μ2 Sco (pronounced Mew two, like the legendary Pokémon) is a hot, blue, giant star about nine times more massive than our Sun. The observations made in this study suggest the presence of two companion candidates.

Advertisement They are called CC0 and μ2 Sco b. The first has not yet been fully confirmed. It appears to have about 18.5 times the mass of Jupiter. The research team confidently discovered that the second planet has a mass about 14.4 times that of Jupiter, so they named this planet correctly. The research team uses the term planet. It is unclear whether these two objects are planets or not. They are so massive that they could be brown dwarfs, stellar objects that are not massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion. The team argued that their properties were more like those of planets than those of failed stars, so they assumed they had formed and were planets. The boundary between the two classes is vague, to say the least.

The ratio between the mass of the star and the mass of the planets is not much different from the Sun-Jupiter ratio, which suggests that massive stars can produce massive planets. big. But there is another notable similarity with our solar system. The innermost candidate planet lies 21 astronomical units from the star; This number is 21 times the Earth-Sun distance, nearly equal to the position of Uranus. Instead, μ2 Sco b is placed at 290 astronomical units. This distance is more than nine times the distance between Pluto and the Sun. But this star is so bright that CC0 receives as much light as Mercury in our solar system. And this μ2 Sco b receives as much light as our Jupiter. This is the first confirmation of such a system around a star going supernova. The object was discovered as part of the B-Star Exoplanet Abundance (BEAST) study, using the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope and Gaia Observatory.

source: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/08/aa43675-22/aa43675-22.html