Discovery date June 20, 2016 | Discovery status Submitted | |
V830 Tauri b is an exoplanet orbiting around the young T Tauri star V830 Tauri, about 427 light-years (131 pc) away from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. The exoplanet has a young age of only about 2 million years.
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Orbit and mass
V830 Tauri b orbits its parent star every 4.93 days at a distance of 0.057 AU from its parent star. This is about 7x closer to the host star than the planet Mercury is to the Sun. Its mass is about 77% that of Jupiter, and, because it is orbiting very close to its parent star, it is classified as a hot Jupiter.
Host star and age
The host star, V830 Tauri, is a T Tauri star that is the same mass of the Sun, but twice the radius. It has a surface temperature of 4250 ± 50 K. In comparison, the Sun has a surface temperature of 5778 K. The star's age is estimated to be about 2 million years old, which makes it a very young star. For comparison, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old. The star has not yet fully contracted to become a main sequence star, which ties in with its bloated radius but similar mass to the Sun. Given its mass, it will likely be on the main sequence portion of its lifetime for about 10 billion years, much like the Sun.
Significance
Previously, before the discovery of V830 Tauri b (and a slightly older planet named K2-33b, with an age around 5-10 million years), TW Hya b was discovered and disproven and PTFO 8-8695 b / CVSO 30 b was discovered with an age equally young and an orbit even closer. The yet unconfirmed objects are pending confirmation. The discovery of V830 Tauri b, K2-33b and PTFO 8-8695 b / CVSO 30 b proves that the formation and migration of close-in giant planets can occur on a timescale of only a few million years. The new discoveries support planet-disc interactions as the most likely mechanism for efficiently producing young hot Jupiters.