BEAST planets don’t represent something you can only find in a sci-fi movie or video game. Such cosmic objects exist in reality, while the BEAST stands for B-star Exoplanet Abundance STudy. BEAST represents a newfound type of planet that is about the same size as Jupiter and orbits stars that are several times more massive than the Sun. Astronomers had some trouble tracking down the origin of such puzzling planets.
Thanks to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, we now know that scientists from the University of Sheffield discovered that massive stars existing in the area of a galaxy where there’s the highest density of stars are able to steal or capture huge planets the size of Jupiter. Jupiter is the biggest planet in our Solar System – it’s so huge that 1,300 planets the size of Earth would easily fit inside of it.
Dr. Emma Daffern-Powell, the co-author of the study and who works at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Sheffield, explains, as SciTechDaily quotes:
Our previous research has shown that in stellar nurseries stars can steal planets from other stars, or capture what we call ‘free-floating’ planets. We know that massive stars have more influence in these nurseries than Sun-like stars, and we found that these massive stars can capture or steal planets – which we call ‘BEASTies’.
She also added, as the same source quotes:
Essentially, this is a planetary heist. We used computer simulations to show that the theft or capture of these BEASTies occurs on average once in the first 10 million years of the evolution of a star-forming region.
Astronomers estimate that almost every star in the observable Universe has planets revolving around it. Even so, only about 5,000 exoplanets had been proven irrefutably to exist.
