Swiss discovery of misplaced planet challenges established theories

A rocky planet has been discovered in the "wrong" place by the Swiss space telescope CHEOPS. The find forces scientists to rethink current theories on the formation of planetary systems. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox Scientists had assumed that planetary systems follow a clear architecture: smaller rocky planets orbit close to the central star, while large gas giants orbit further out. But the planetary system around a star called LHS 1903, located 116 light-years from Earth, apparently does not follow this order, according to the University of Bern. Using CHEOPS, the international research team, which includes researchers from the universities of Bern and Geneva, discovered a rocky planet in a location where, according to current theories, a gas giant should have formed. The results were published in the journal Science. To explain this anomaly, researchers first examined various hypotheses that could also be reconciled with established theories.