Our vast, expanding universe is filled with various and strange space objects. And there are millions more waiting to be discovered. NASA’s Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is one such mission dedicated to searching for planets outside our solar system. While examining the large amount of data obtained by TESS, astronomers stumbled upon a cosmic cannonball.

Surprisingly, the exoplanet has about 13 Jupiter masses. “This is one of the largest and most heavily transiting giant planets known to date,” the research paper says.

This discovery challenges our current understanding of planet formation.

A strange exoplanet

TOI-4603b was studied by a team of astronomers led by Akanksha Khandelwal from the Physical Research Laboratory in India. According to TESS, the radius of this exoplanet is 1,042 times that of Jupiter. The exoplanet orbits a star 730 light-years from Earth in a 7.25-day orbit.

The team was able to decipher TOI-4603b’s mass using radial velocity measurements, which is likely 12.89 times the mass of Jupiter. Astronomers believe that the amount of mass a planet can have is theoretically limited. The team proposes that it belongs to a specific category of planets whose formation and evolution are still unknown to astronomers.

The team notes that 10 to 13 Jupiter sizes are considered the upper mass limit for a planet. The paper adds that TOI-4603b is a “valuable addition to the population of less than five nearby massive planets in the high-mass planet-low-mass brown dwarf overlap region, and that more is needed to understand the processes responsible for their formation.