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Three years ago, Carnegie University astronomers examining a small star called a red dwarf found something unexpected<\/a>: a Jupiter-sized gas giant.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a star system like our own, this would be unremarkable. But at nearly a quarter the size of its host star, the exoplanet, TOI 5205b, was \u2014 in the literal sense \u2014 impossibly large. It blocked seven percent of the star\u2019s light whenever it passed in front of it, forming one of the largest exoplanet transits on record. It was so physics-defying that the astronomers dubbed it \u201cforbidden\u201d; existing gas planet formation models couldn\u2019t explain how a puny red dwarf, which is only forty percent of the mass of the Sun, could be capable of giving birth to it.<\/p>\n Now, the astronomers got a second look with the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> to peer into its atmosphere. And their findings, published in a new study<\/a> in The Astronomical Journal, reveal even more unusual aspects of the oversized world.\u00a0<\/p>\n The main curiosity is that its atmosphere has a lower concentration of heavy elements relative to hydrogen than gas giants in our own solar system (Jupiter and Saturn), suggesting something different about its formation.<\/p>\n Compared to its host star, the forbidden world also a lower metallicity, a term that describes the abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.<\/p>\n \u201cThese findings have implications for our understanding of the giant planet formation process that occurs early in a star\u2019s lifespan,\u201d lead author and Carnegie astronomer Anjali Piette said in a statement about the work<\/a>.<\/p>\n