NASA has spotted something big in the Milky Way. Even though our galaxy may seem one of the most “boring” ones because it’s the one we live in, there are still mysteries that science can crack or hasn’t even found yet. That’s why space telescopes were built, to look at the cosmos with lenses that humans don’t have and capture different types of signals. Now, they have found something so big that it makes Saturn look like a planet in formation. But planets like this have a tragic destiny.
Searching comes with a price: Everything we know is constantly changing
Every discovery questions the current understanding of planet formation. Some don’t orbit any star and are just wandering in space. Others have supernovas, young stars, and dead cosmic lighthouses to orbit. Meanwhile, Earth is in the perfect spot in our solar system to hold life, something that scientists don’t see anywhere else.
On the other hand, NASA has found an unusually massive gas orb orbiting a star so small that it’s nearly scoffed at by classic theories. Hints point to a red dwarf host, lightweight but somehow holding onto a gargantuan companion with an atmosphere so broad it puffs well beyond expectations.
NASA found a new planet: There’s something different about this one
Astronomers from NASA have found a giant planet, TOI-6894b, orbiting a tiny red dwarf star that’s only about a fifth of the Sun’s mass. What’s wild is that this planet is bigger than Saturn, but weighs only half as much. For years, astronomers thought that stars this small couldn’t form or keep massive gas planets—but here’s proof they can.
Reports in Nature Astronomy and on Earth.com point out that giant planets around small stars may be more common than scientists believed. That challenges the old view of how planetary systems come together and how this could impact our solar system, even changing the understanding of how Earth was formed billions of years ago.
New theories on planet formation: This changes everything
This planet breaks the script. Standard models, like core accretion, say small stars shouldn’t have enough gas and dust around them to build something this big. The TOI-6894b forces NASA to think that, maybe, it formed through a twist on core accretion, or a gravitational instability—where chunks of a disk collapse on their own—played a role.
Meanwhile, NASA has also found other cosmic bodies to help use the James Webb, such as the TOI 1227 b—the youngest exoplanet ever discovered, living its last moments in the universe. It doesn’t have the same size as other planets in our solar system. The TOI-270 was also found using the James Webb, and it’s changing what we know about planet formation.
TOI-6894b temperature only borders humans on paper
TOI-6894b isn’t being cooked by its star the way many gas giants do. Its temperature sits around 420 K (147 °C), which is cool enough for scientists to study more closely. NASA thinks the planet’s atmosphere may hold methane and maybe even ammonia. That makes it a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which could give scientists new clues about how planets take shape around small stars.
But TOI-6894b isn’t the whole story. Most stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, so finding a world like this suggests there could be plenty more giant planets hiding out there – and one of them is running away from our galaxy. Teams from the University of Warwick, University College London, and the University of Birmingham are already working on a solution to figure out how planets like this appear, and how many different kinds of solar systems might exist across the galaxy.