TW Hydrae

TW Hydrae, TW Hya is short, with a distance of about 54 parsecs of the sun next classical T Tauri star. TW Hydrae has about 80 % of the mass of the Sun but is only 5 to 10 million years old. The special feature of TW Hydrae is that he is surrounded by a disk of dust from which it is itself caused by accretion. The dust disk was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the vicinity of TW Hydrae are more about 20 stars are likely to have the same age as TW Hydrae. This cluster of stars is called the TW - Hydrae association.

A team led by Johny Setiawan of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg published a 2007 study in which they claimed the discovery of a substellar object with a minimum mass of ( 9.8 ± 3.3 ) Jupiter masses around TW Hya and characterized as a potential exoplanets. However, a study by other researchers in 2008 could not confirm the supposed discovery. In 2013, based on scaling to previous hydrodynamic simulations of gap opening criteria for embedded proto- planet, a planetary companion could the gap form a mass between 6-28 M ⊕ ( orbital radius of 80 AU) have.