Anomalously Huge Planets Have Been Detected Orbiting a Bafflingly Young Star
This shouldn't be possible.
MICHELLE STARR 16 OCT 2018
A wee baby star at the tender age of just 2 million years has revealed itself to be quite the precocious little cosmic object.
Astronomers have discovered it has not one, but four planets in the protoplanetary disc of dust and gas that surrounds it - and they are all gargantuan, with the biggest coming in at 11 times the mass of Jupiter, and the smallest about the mass of Saturn.
Moreover, their orbits are incredibly distant. The outermost is more than 1,000 times the distance from the star than the innermost. That's the most extreme range of orbits ever observed in a planetary system; Pluto, for context, is only around 102 times the distance from the Sun as Mercury.
The star is named CI Tau, located around 500 light-years away in a star-forming region of the constellation of Taurus, and it's been a bit of a brain teaser since 2016. That's when the first of its planets - the largest of the four, the super-Jupiter named CI Tau b - was discovered, orbiting really close to the star, completing a full orbit every 9 days.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/ci-tau-star-protoplanetary-disc-four-gas-giants-jupiter-saturn-mass-extreme-orbit-mystery