The Bubble-Gum Planet: Pink Beauty should not have formed at all!
In early September 2013, news emerged that scientists had discovered a new planet in the constellation Virgo. The dark pink body, about the size of Jupiter and four times its mass, is 57 light-years away from Earth.
Shortly after its discovery, it showed scientists how little they know about the universe.
“Because of it, we will have to reconsider the view of the formation of solar systems,” admits astrophysicist Markus Janson from Princeton University in New Persey, who introduced the planet to the public.
It is only the second planet captured by an infrared camera for which scientists have been able to determine a color.
The impressive deep purple color indicates that the planet is relatively young and has extremely high temperatures of around 240°C (460°F) on its surface. Scientists estimate its age at 100 to 500 million years.
It is also the smallest planet ever captured using infrared cameras. However, all these unique features do not fascinate scientists as much as the fact that the body exists. It contradicts existing theories.
The pink giant orbits the star Epsilon Virginis at a distance 44 times greater than the distance of the Earth from the Sun. At the same time, the current theory states that the gravitational force created by massive collisions of matter fragments attracts gases from the vicinity of the parent star.
But GJ 504b is too far from it for its gravitational force on gaseous particles to reach. If the current hypotheses were valid, the planet should not exist.
The discovery of GJ 504b was part of a larger survey, the Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru or SEEDS program, which seeks to explain how planetary systems come together by looking at star systems of many sizes and ages with images at near-infrared wavelengths.
Direct imaging can help scientists measure an alien planet’s luminosity, temperature, atmosphere, and orbit, but it’s difficult to detect faint planets next to their bright parent stars. The study’s leader, Masayuki Kuzuhara of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said the task is “like trying to take a picture of a firefly near a searchlight.”
Two of the Subaru Telescope’s tools in particular — the High Contrast Instrument for the Subaru Next Generation Adaptive Optics and the InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph — help scientists tease out light from these faint exoplanet sources.
