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Planet Surprise

5 December 2023

William sent in the link https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-find-huge-planet-that-shouldn-t-exist/ … but see also https://www.livescience.com/space/exoplanets/enormous-planet-discovered-around-tiny-star-could-break-our-understanding-of-solar-system-formation … basically, what has excited astronomers is the discovery of a giant planet orbiing around a small sun. This may upend mainstream thinking on how our solar system formed. On the other hand, it probaly won’t. The consensus will survive.

It was spotted at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, a telescope designed to detect ‘so called’ cool stars. Are they really cool – or just different. I suspect astronomers will now start to look more closely at these so called cool stars. Suvrath Mahadevon, from Penn State and involved in the discovery, seems quite relaxed. He is online as saying, ‘the discovery really drives home the point of just how little we know about the universe.’ Which sums it up in a nutshell. If it exists it cannot be abnormal. They will probably now go on to find lots of them.

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