Weird Science Weekly: Astronomers detect a planet that shouldn’t exist

Weird science happens every day, all around us. This week, we have three of the weirdest examples, including a mystery planet that shouldn't be there, tongue twisters teaching speech secrets, and how, when it comes to typing, our hands might know what they're doing, but our brains don't seem to have a clue...


The planet that shouldn't be
A team of astronomers led by University of Arizona grad student Vanessa Bailey has discovered a distant alien world that shouldn't be there. The planet, named HD 106906 b, is 11 times the mass of Jupiter and it orbits its star at a shocking distance of 650 astronomical units (1 AU is around 150 million kilometres, or the distance between the Earth and the sun). For comparison, the most distant planet in our solar system, Neptune, is only around 30 AU out, and the most distant dwarf planet, Eris, is only around 67 AU out. If a planet like HD 106906 b existed around our sun, it would take Voyager 1 (which just left our sun's heliosphere) another 150 years to reach it!

HD 106906 b orbiting around its parent star
The problem with HD 106906 b is that neither of the existing models of planet formation — disk instability nor core accretion — can account for both its size and its distance from its star. Planets of that size (or larger) can certainly form, but it's been generally accepted that there wouldn't be enough material that far out from the star to produce it.
It's possible that this star-planet duo developed like a binary star system, but whereas the central star had plenty of material to work with, the region that HD 106906 b formed had far less, which essentially stunted its growth.
Things out in space just keep getting stranger and stranger, and I love it!


Source: Yahoo.com.ph