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Orbiting a B-type Star –Emitting large amounts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation The spectral type of the primary star, an early B-type star, suggests it is even more massive, likely eight times the mass of the sun, sufficient to end its life as a core collapse supernova.įast Facts About Young Stars of the Universe

Located approximately 325 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, the b Centauri two-star system (also known as HIP 71865) has at least six times the mass of the Sun according to dynamical measurements, making it by far the most massive system around which a planet has been confirmed. SPHERE has successfully imaged several planets orbiting stars other than the Sun before, including taking the first ever-image of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star. The massive planet was imaged by the sophisticated Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) mounted on VLT. “Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts,” explains Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University, Sweden and first author of the new study published online today in Nature. Transforms What We Know about Massive Stars as Planet Hosts The planet was spotted orbiting it at 100 times the distance Jupiter orbits the Sun, which might guarantee its survival. This is the hottest and most massive planet-hosting star system found to date. The Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile has captured an image of a planet orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system that can be seen with the naked eye.

Until now, no planets had been spotted around a star more than three times as massive as the Sun, reports the European Southern Observatories (ESO). “It’s a harsh environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale: the stars are bigger, the planet is bigger, the distances are bigger.” “The planet in b Centauri is an alien world in an environment that is completely different from what we experience here on Earth and in our Solar System,” explains co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a researcher in exoplanet detection at Stockholm University.