Astronomers have discovered a planet three times larger than Jupiter that travels a long way in the shape of an egg around its star. If this planet were somehow inserted into our own solar system, it would move from inside our asteroid belt to outside Neptune. Other large planets with highly elliptical orbits have been orbiting other stars, but none of these worlds were located at the outermost points of their star systems like this one.
“This planet is unlike the planets in our solar system, but other than that, it’s unlike any other exoplanets we’ve discovered so far,” says Sarah Blunt, a graduate student Caltech and the first author of the new study published in the Astronomical Journal. “Other planets found far away from their stars usually have very low remoteness, making their orbits more accurate. The fact that this planet is so high in margins speaks to little difference in the way it was created or developed compared to the other planets. ”
The planet was discovered using the radial distance method, an exoplanet detection mechanism that discovers a new world by monitoring how their parent stars “move” in response to tubs. gravity from these planets. However, analyzes of these data typically call for observations made over a planet’s orbital period. For planets that are moving far from their stars, this can be tricky: a full orbit can take tens or even hundreds of years.
California Planet Research, led by Caltech Astronomy Professor Andrew W. Howard, is one of the few star-observing organizations over the decades-long timeframes needed to find long-lived exoplanets using radial speed. The data needed to discover the new planet were provided by the two observatories used by California Planet Search – the Lick Observatory in Northern California and the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii – and by the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
The astronomers have been observing the star of the planet, known as HR 5183, since the 1990s, but do not have data corresponding to one full orbit of the planet, called HR 5183 b, because it orbits its star around every 45 to 100 years. Instead the team discovered the planet because of the strange orbit.
“This planet spends most of its time lodging in the outer part of its star planet system in this truly eccentric orbit, then it starts to accelerate in and doing a slingshot around her star, ”Howard explained. “We found this slingshot move. We saw the planet coming in and now it is on its way out. That creates a name that is so special that we can be sure that this is a real planet, even if we have not seen a complete orbit. ”
The new findings show that it is possible to use the radial distance method to find traces of other distant planets without waiting decades. And, the researchers suggest, looking for more planets like this one could shed light on the role of the major planets in shaping their solar systems.
Planets take the shape of disks of material left behind by stars. That means planets should start in flat, rounded orbits. For the recently discovered planet to be in such a strange orbit, it must have received a gravitational kick from something else. The most plausible scenario, the researchers suggest, is that the planet once had a similarly sized neighbor. When the two planets got close enough to each other, one pushed the other out of the solar system, forcing HR 5183 ba into orbit in a very strange orbit.
“Basically, this modern planet would have come in as a destructive ball,” Howard said, “knocking anything out of the way.”
This discovery shows that our understanding of planets outside our solar system is still evolving. Researchers still find a world that is unlike anything in our solar system or in solar systems we have already discovered.
“Copernicus taught us that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, and as we expanded to discover other solar systems of exoplanets, we expected them to be carbon copies of the solar system. ourselves, ”Howard explains,“ But it has been one surprise after another in this field. This modern planet is another example of a system that is not an image of our solar system but has amazing features that make our universe so rich in diversity. ”
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