Scientists have discovered an impossibly large planet — so big, they say, that it should be too big to exist.
And yet. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers out of Pennsylvania State described their whopper discovery: a Neptune-sized planet that’s 13 times the mass of Earth, which is orbiting a tiny ultracool star that’s nine times less massive than our Sun.
As a press release about the new research explains, this finding is exceptional because the mass ratio between the planet and the dwarf star, dubbed LHS 3,154, is 100 times greater than the same ratio Earth has with its Sun — which scientists didn’t think was possible until they saw it with their own eyes.
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