SC astronomy professor helps discover and photograph bizarre, ‘extreme’ planet

A South Carolina university professor has been credited with helping discover and photograph a bizarre planet in a distant solar system.

Joe Carson, an associate professor of astronomy at the College of Charleston, was part of a team that helped discover a gas giant planet that orbits two stars in the b Centauri system, according to a study published in Nature.

The discovery was unusual for several reasons. One, the binary stars at the center of the solar system are a combined six times as large as the sun, making it the most massive star system known that has planets orbiting it, according to a news release from the College of Charleston.

“Adding to its peculiarity, the gas giant planet has an orbital distance that is a staggering 100 times greater than the distance of Jupiter from our own Sun, making this one of the widest orbit planets ever discovered,” Carson said in a news release. “Extreme in almost every regard, the planet system challenges our conventional ideas about how planets form.”

Scientists from Sweden, Italy, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom are all listed as co-authors of the study. Carson’s contribution to the study was “the original work to help establish the observational survey,” which was done on a massive, 26-foot telescope in Chile, according to the news release.