Study Reveals A Planetary System With An Unexpected Rocky Planet In Its Outer Region
An international scientific team, led by the University of Warwick and involving the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics, has used the European Space Agency’s Cheops satellite to discover that the planetary system around the star LHS 1903 challenges current planet formation theories with the unusual order of its planets. Surprisingly, the most distant outer planet might be rocky and seems to have formed later – in a different environment than the other planets around the star. The study is published in the prestigious journal Science. In our Solar System, the inner planets (Mercury to Mars) are rocky, and the outer planets (Jupiter to Neptune) are gaseous. This planetary pattern – rock then gas – is consistently observed across the Milky Way. That was, until an international team of scientists, led by Dr. Thomas Wilson Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, University of Warwick, took a closer look at a star called LHS 1903. Their observations reveal a system of four p...