Massive planet too big for its own sun pushes astronomers to rethink exoplanet formation

LHS 3154b, a newly discovered massive planet that should be too big to exist. The Pennsylvania State University

Imagine you’re a farmer searching for eggs in the chicken coop – but instead of a chicken egg, you find an ostrich egg, much larger than anything a chicken could lay.

That’s a little how our team of astronomers felt when we discovered a massive planet, more than 13 times heavier than Earth, around a cool, dim red star, nine times less massive than Earth’s Sun, earlier this year.