Of all the planets discovered by humans in other solar systems, most of them orbit close to and close to their parent star. This is partly due to the selection effect: outposts from the easy place (Meaning a planet outside our solar system) Close to their star (or stars).
So, finding a planet that is actually far from its parent star – very rare, in fact, is difficult to do even in our own solar system. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest the existence of a gigantic planet beyond Pluto’s orbital theoretical planet nine; The problem is, it’s impossible to find.
This week, an invention The gigantic Exoplanet, 336 light-years away, is 11 times the mass of Jupiter, which has renewed interest in the discovery of Planet Nine and may have some clues to its discovery. This is because the existence of this exoplanet, named HD 106906b, proves that it is not possible to locate distant, massive planets in the solar system, but provides clues as to how that might have happened.
In a paper published this week, Astronomers studied several years of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope on an exoplanet called the HD106906 b. Astronomers first discovered the Exoplanet in 2013 with the Magellan telescope at the Los Campanas Laboratory in the Atacama Desert in Chile. At the time, astronomers had no idea the planet’s orbit or its size.
According to New sheet, It orbits its host stars (yes, it’s plural – it’s a binary star system) once every 15,000 human years. Thus, it sits at a distance of 730 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun from its host binary stars. This is 18 times more than Pluto came from our Sun.
Another oddity about the Exoplanet is how inclined it is in its orbit. To put in the environment: The Sun and all the planets in our solar system (and most solar systems) appeared from a single protoplanetary nebula, a spiral, disk-shaped gas and dust bubble billions of years ago. Because they are all made of the same material that moves in the same direction, the planets in our solar system orbit in the same plane. . Everything lined up.
But HD106906 b does not follow that rule. In fact, it has an “extreme orbit” that is very sloping and elliptical.
“To highlight why this is so different, we can look at our own solar system and see that all the planets are in the same plane,” said Meiji Nguyen of the University of California-Berkeley, who led the study. Said in a statement. “It would be weird if Jupiter was tilted 30 degrees compared to other planets orbiting.”
Its bizarre location in its own solar system raises many questions, but the imaginary planet in our solar system may also provide answers to nine.
As I explained earlier, the so-called Planet Nine is a hot topic in the astronomical community. Over the past decade, many astronomers have suggested that disruptions in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune may indicate the existence of a world that has not yet been observed, or some small, heavy exotic object such as a micro.Black hole. (Such a situation is unprecedented: Neptune was discovered not by direct observation, but by astronomer Alexis Boward, who observed the disruption of Uranus’ orbit and predicted the existence of an unknown planet, which became Neptune.) But according to a new study of the Exoplanet HD 106906b, the view behind its eccentric orbit could provide an explanation behind Planet Nine.
“Despite the lack of detection of Planet Nine to date, the planet’s orbit can be predicted based on its effect on various objects in the outer solar system,” said Robert de Rosa, chief of the European Southern Laboratory in Santiago, Chile. “It says if a planet is really responsible for what we observe in orbit Trans-Neptune objects It must have a strange orbit associated with the plane of the solar system. “
“This prediction of Planet Nine’s orbit is similar to what we see with the HD 106906b,” De Rosa explained.
Planet Nine was formed in the inner solar system, and then Jupiter kicked it beyond Pluto — but this is only a theory.
“The planet’s orbit is very sloping, long, and the dusty debris around its host stars is outside the disk,” Avi Lope, head of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon via email. “In that sense, it’s similar to the orbit recommended for Planet 9 in the solar system.”
In A recent sheet With his student Aamir Siraj, they suggest that an imaginary planet may be the result of nine star clusters.
“They can capture planets orbiting other stars, especially if they have a sub-star with them,” Lope said. “The captured planets are found in distant and very oblique orbits, as exhibited by HD106906 b and Planet Nine in the Solar System in this exo-planetary system.
The origin of the HD 106906b is still unclear: how far did it come from its parent stars, and why is its orbit so inclined?
“We do not know where or how the planet originated,” de Rosa told the Exoplanet. “Although we have made the first measurements of the orbital motion, there are still great uncertainties in the various orbital parameters.