Giant planet confounds theories

Los Angeles Times : Vanessa Bailey of the University of Arizona and her collaborators have discovered a gas giant whose mass (11 times that of Jupiter) and orbit (650 times wider than that of Earth’s around the Sun) cannot be accounted for by current theories of how solar systems form. The planet’s star, HD 106906, had attracted the interest of planet hunters, thanks to its large circumstellar disk, which was suspected of harboring young planets. A campaign to monitor the system using the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert began in 2005 and paid off earlier this year. Bailey and her collaborators hypothesize that the planet formed at or near its current orbit independently of its star.