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Sub-Saturn exoplanet 8,500 light years away From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OGLE-2012-BLG-0950Lb is a sub-Saturn (super-Neptune)-type planet 2,600 parsecs (8,500 ly) away with 39[1] or 35[2] Earth masses. This type of planet was once thought to be extremely rare because of runaway gas accretion, which would create a gap between 4 and 8 Earth radii or 20 and 80 Earth masses, peaking around 32-64 Earth masses.[3] The planet is 2.6 AU from its star.[1][4] It is likely near-impossible to know much else about the planet's properties (or its star's) because it was detected by gravitational microlensing.[4] The mass of the host star is approximately 0.56 solar masses (consistent with an M0-0.5V-type star).[5] This exoplanet was the first to have its mass found out using only microlens parallax and lens flux.[5]
According to microlensing and Kepler data, analogues to this world should be common, showing that our Solar System is not necessarily a perfect model for planetary formation and the runaway gas accretion model may be incorrect or incomplete. This has implications for habitability because gas/ice giants like Jupiter and Neptune greatly influenced the Earth's water content (see Grand Tack hypothesis).[6]
Sub-Saturns have a wide range of makeups, from puffy planets to large-core worlds.[7] With a radius of 6.5 Earth radii (predicted based on mass-radius relationships), the density would be 0.87 (39 Earth masses) or 0.7 g/cm3 (35 Earth masses), implying a Saturn-like composition closer to a standard gas giant than an ice giant. Tholins, a building block of life, are very common in these types of planets as well as the universe as a whole and thus may be present here.[8]
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