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.
The smaller star, called an M star, is not only smaller than the Sun in Earth’s solar system, but it’s 100 times less luminous. Such a star should not have the necessary amount of material in its planet-forming disk to birth such a massive planet.
