by Astronomers have discovered a rare star system located just 100 light-years away, with six planets stuck extremely close to their host star – so close, in fact, that all their orbits could fit within the distance between them. mercury and our sun. Which is not enough, unlike our own solar system, this new offspring of the cosmos appears to have not changed much since its birth over a billion years ago.
“If the Empire State Building were the galaxy, we can only see and perceive the planets near them stars that there are flats on our floor,” study co-author Enric Palle from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias told reporters during a press conference.
100 light year It may sound like a distance, but from a cosmic point of view, the system is very close to us. Named HD 110067, it is located in the constellation Coma Berenices, near Virgo in the northern sky.
And because the six planets in HD 10067 are as cozy as their fair, bright and orange star, none of them lie in the habitable zone, the region around a star with the right conditions to support life as we know it. The planets also orbit very quickly, so their “years” are from 9 days to 55 days.
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Scale animation of the orbits of the six newly discovered planets in the HD110067 system about 100 light years from Earth. The pitch of the notes played when each planet transits matches the resonant change in orbital frequencies between each subsequent planet.
(Video credit: Animation, composition and notes by Dr. Hugh Osborn (University of Bern), background image by NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse)
First detected in 2020 by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers soon realized that they were dealing with at least two so-called sub Neptunewhich are planets about two or three times as large as World and blanketed by like puffy atmosphere. The northern sky was due to disappear below the horizon soon after TESS’s detection, meaning the team only had a month or two to confirm the discovery using ground-based telescopes, said the co-author of the studies Rafael Luque from the University of Chicago.
Then, with new data from TESS, collected when it visited the same patch of sky two years later, as well as an “orchestral campaign” aimed at the star for more detailed observations from European Space AgencyCharacteristic Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops), scientists confirmed a third exoplanet in the system.
The other three outer planets have been attributed to incongruent dips of starlight in the TESS data, which are known to be caused by the orbital planets, thanks to the orbits of the three confirmed planets being almost perfect in what the scientists on them resonance. That is, the first planet makes three orbits for every two of the second planet. The exact same dynamic plays out between the next two planets. The fourth planet is calculated to make four orbits for every three of the fifth planet, which, in turn, makes four orbits around the star for every three of the outermost planet.
In our own solar system, Pluto is conjunct Neptune (it orbits our sun twice for every three orbits of Neptune).
“This system will help us answer questions without having to go through the different exoplanet systems that exist,” said Keighley Rockcliffe, a graduate student studying exoplanet atmospheres at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who was not involved in the new research, by Space. com. Because the six planets orbit the same star and do not seem to have changed their locations since their formation, astronomers can use this one system to better understand planetary system formation and evolution processes through the different parameters of the six planets to compare their compositions, said Rockcliffe.
“It’s like how studying a plant – maybe the colors of flower petals – can tell us about the soil it grew from,” she said. “So HD 110067 has a lot of exciting stuff!”
Luque, the first person to inform colleagues at NASA about securing the outer planets Ames Research Centerhe recalled sharing the news with the rest of the team via a conference call.
“I could hear the gasp in the room even through my headphones when there were no microphones around,” he said. “You could see it was a very nice discovery.”
This perfectly resonant system with its long chain of planets is a rare find. It’s something that “we learn in school but we don’t really think applies to nature,” said study co-author Hugh Osborn of the University of Bern, who recalled being “shocked and delighted” when he learned about it first. discovery. “Often, we make predictions, and nature finds a way to do something else that doesn’t match what we expect.”
Planets begin in resonance when they are born from dusty protoplanetary disks, but those delicate orbits are usually thrown out of balance by foreign stars passing over or leading planets, which are larger than others within of the system, walking too close. This has also happened within our solar system, but HD 110067 appears to have been very strong during any such break.
“We used mathematical theory to predict these orbits and nature matched these beautiful, perfect fractions,” Osborn said. “That was a great moment.”
Studying the planets may even shed light on why many solar systems, including our own, do not have a sub-Neptune, despite this type of planet being the most common type on Earth. The Milky Way. In our corner of the cosmos, Jupiter It is thought to have played a decisive role in shaping the early evolution of our system and its planets, possibly reducing all available material so that a planet as large as a sub- Neptune meet.
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As such, the newly discovered planetary system is a “golden target” for further study because it looks the way most systems would when the protoplanetary disk forming a planet dissipates, said study co-author Adrien Leleu of the University of Geneva.
In the coming months, the team plans to measure the masses of the planets, which would provide insight into the chemical composition of the system. Then, it might be possible to “reverse engineer” the evolution of these planets to better understand their formation mechanisms, the scientists shared during the briefing.
This research is described in a paper was published on Wednesday (November 29) in the journal Nature.
