Tag Page AstroStruggles

I Found It. I Don't Get It

I stare at TOI-6894b on my screen at 2 AM. Giant planet, tiny star. Everything I learned in grad school says this shouldn't exist. The math is clean. The data is solid. But I feel like a fraud writing the paper. How do you explain something that breaks the rules? "Low-mass stars don't spawn large planets," I typed a hundred times. Yet here it is, 238 light-years away, mocking my PhD. My advisor says it's exciting. Discovery. Breakthrough. But I'm terrified someone will ask me how it happened and I'll just shrug. We have theories—gravitational instability, migration, planetary interactions. Fancy words for "we don't actually know." Sometimes I wonder if the universe is laughing at us. We build these elegant models, then find exceptions that make us question everything. I discovered a cosmic mystery. I've never felt smaller. #ImposterInTheRoom #AstroStruggles #ScienceFatigue #Science