Researchers have discovered a strange, young “toddler” star with four massive planets in orbit around it. This is the first time that so many massive planets have been found in such a young stellar system. The star at the center of this system, CI Tau, is only two million years old and surrounded by a protoplanetary disk made up of dust and ice. In this disk, the system’s planets, asteroids, moons, and other objects form. Scientists already knew about this system because they’d found a hot Jupiter — a gas giant exoplanet that orbits close to their star — around CT. It was the first hot Jupiter to be discovered around such a young star.
That prompted astronomers at the University of Cambridge to use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to see if that planet had any siblings, according to study author Cathie Clarke from Cambridge University’s Institute of ...
