8 Biggest, Weirdest Mysteries In Space

6. Where Do Hot Jupiters Come From?

Artist’s Impression Of A Hot Jupiter Exoplanet In The Star Cluster Messier 67
Wikipedia

In their search for exoplanets, scientists began to come across a lot of "Hot Jupiters". These are gas giants, much like Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system, but unlike them, they are in a tight orbit around their host star. This is puzzling to a lot of scientists, as many think that there couldn't be enough accretion disk material in the inner solar system to form their massive cores, because that material should have gone into forming the parent star.

Some think that a possible explanation for these enormous, boiling planets, is that they formed in the more distant regions of their solar systems, and migrated inwards towards the star, but some think that they must have formed in situ - the only question is how.

Part of the reason why we keep coming across these exotic planets, is that their size and proximity to their star makes them easy to spot, so hopefully we'll get to the bottom of these boiling worlds soon.

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