Astronomers have discovered an unusual star system just 100 light-years away from us, where six planets are clustered extremely close to their host star, so close in fact that their entire orbits fit within the distance between them. Mercury and our sun. Surprisingly, unlike our own solar system, this newly discovered slice of the cosmos appears to have remained largely unchanged since its birth a billion years ago.
“If the galaxy were the Empire State Building, we would only be able to see and detect the planets next to it.” stars “We have just discovered our neighbour,” Enric Palle, one of the study’s authors from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, told reporters at a press conference.
one hundred light years It may seem quite distant, but cosmically speaking, the system is incredibly close to us. This star, called HD 110067, is located in the constellation Coma Berenices, near Virgo in the northern sky.
And since the six planets in HD 10067 are very bright and very comfortable with their orange stars, none habitable zone, the region around a star that has the right conditions to support life as we know it. The planets also orbit very quickly, so much so that their “years” range from 9 days to 55 days.
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Scale animation of the orbits of six newly discovered planets located approximately 100 light-years from Earth in the HD110067 system. The pitch of the notes played during each planet’s transit matches the resonant change in orbital frequencies between each subsequent planet.
(Video credit: Animation, composition and descriptions by Dr. Hugh Osborn (University of Bern), background image by NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse)
It was first detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in 2020 (TESS), astronomers realized early on that they were dealing with at least two pseudo-objects. sub neptuneplanets about two to three times larger Soil and apparently it was covered up fluffy atmospheres. The northern sky will disappear below the horizon shortly after TESS’s detection, meaning the team only has about a month to confirm the discovery using ground-based telescopes, said study co-author Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago.
This was followed by new data collected from TESS when it revisited the same region of the sky two years later, as well as a “orchestrated campaign” targeting the star for more detailed observations. European Space AgencyIdentifying the Exoplanet Satellite (shop), scientists confirmed the third outer planet In the system.
The remaining three exoplanets were attributed to unique starlight dips in the TESS data that are known to originate from orbiting planets, thanks to the orbits of the three planets confirmed to exist almost perfectly in what scientists call resonances. That is, the first planet makes three orbits for every two of the second planet. Exactly the same dynamics occur between the next two planets. The fourth planet is calculated to make four orbits for every three of the fifth planet; This makes four orbits around the star for every three outermost planets.
In our own solar system, Pluto has a similar resonance with Neptune (it orbits our sun twice in every three orbits of Neptune).
“This system will help us answer questions without having to scan through all the different existing exoplanet systems,” Keighley Rockcliffe, a graduate student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who studies exoplanet atmospheres and was not involved in the new research, told Space. com. Since the six planets orbit the same star and their positions do not appear to have changed since their formation, astronomers can use this single system alone to better understand the formation and evolution processes of the planetary system by comparing various parameters of the six planets, including their compositions. said Rockcliffe.
“It’s like examining a plant—perhaps the colors of a flower’s petals—telling us about the soil in which it grew,” he said. “So there really is a lot of exciting stuff in HD 110067!”
Luque was the first to be notified of confirmation of exoplanets by colleagues at NASA Ames Research Centerhe recalled sharing the news with the rest of the team via a conference call.
“I could even hear the breathing in the room through my headphones when there was no microphone around,” he said. “You could see that this was a beautiful discovery.”
This perfect resonance system with its long chain of planets is a rare find. “We learn about it in school, but we don’t really think it applies to nature,” said Hugh Osborn of the University of Bern, one of the authors of the study, and recalled that he was “shocked and delighted” when he first learned this information. discovery. “Often we make predictions and nature finds a way to do something else that doesn’t exactly match what we expected.”
Planets start out in resonance when they are born from dusty protoplanetary disks, but these delicate orbits tend to upset the balance due to outer stars that are larger than others in the system and pass by or dominate planets that get too close. This has also occurred in our solar system, but HD 110067 appears to have remained impressively intact during such disruptions.
“We used mathematical theory to predict these orbits, and nature actually matched these beautiful, perfect fractions,” Osborn said. “That was a great moment.”
Studying the planets may shed light on why many solar systems, including our own, do not have a sub-Neptune; yet such planets are the most common type on Earth. Milky Way. In our corner of the universe, Jupiter It is thought to have played a decisive role in shaping the early evolution of our system and its planets, possibly gobbling up all existing material and leaving no chance of a sub-Neptune-sized planet coalescing.
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Study co-author Adrien Leleu of the University of Geneva said the newly discovered planetary system was a “golden target” for further study as it appeared to be what most systems would do when the planet-forming proto-planetary disk dispersed.
In the coming months, the team plans to measure the masses of the planets, which will provide insight into the chemical structure of the system. Scientists shared at the press conference that it may then be possible to “reverse engineer” the evolution of these planets to better understand their formation mechanisms.
This research is described as follows: paper It was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, November 29.