Key Points
[1/2]An undated handout image shows an artistic rendering of the mass comparison of the star LHS 3154 and its planet LHS 3154b, and our own Earth and Sun..
These stars - or so it was thought - simply are not big enough to host planets much larger than Earth...
But the discovery of a planet at least 13 times Earth's mass orbiting very close to a red dwarf only 11% of the sun's mass has astronomers going back to the drawing board on planetary formation theory involving this prevalent type of star..
"We discovered a planet that is too massive for its star," said Penn State astronomer Suvrath Mahadevan, one of the leaders of the study published this week in the journal Science...
"This planet raises questions of how planets form around the lowest mass stars, because such stars were previously thought to primarily only be able to form small terrestrial planets similar in mass to Earth," Stefnsson said...
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