Young Super-Jupiter Circles Its Binary Star Once Every 15,000 Years

Astronomers are still searching for a hypothetical Planet Nine in the distant reaches of the Solar System, but an 11-Jupiter-mass planet called HD 106906b is looking more and more like the Planet Nine of its planetary system.

HD 106906 is a binary star system located 336 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Crux.

The system is about 15 million years old, and hosts a giant planet, HD 106906b, discovered by the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in 2013.

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Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Kornmesser.

HD 106906b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed Planet Nine.

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Only 12 million years old, or less than three-thousandths of the age of the Sun, Beta Pictoris is 75% more massive than our parent star. It is located about 60 light-years away towards the constellation of Pictor (the Painter) and is one of the best-known examples of a star surrounded by a dusty debris disc.

The planet has a mass of about nine Jupiter masses and the right mass and location to explain the observed warp in the inner parts of the disc.

The Evidence for Planet Nine’s Existence