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An illustration of “double” Jupiter. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)
Astronomers may have uncovered the strange origins of the strangest planets in the universe, the so -called “double hot Jupiter”. The team behind research hopes that their discovery will help find more of this rare planet.
Hot Jupiter Extra Solar Planet or “Exoplanet” sink hot gas giants around the size of Jupiter or over this orbit, which is so narrow to your parent stars that one of your years can last less than one day on earth. While hot Jupiter are rare and only circle 1% of the stars, there are even more scarce “double hot Jupiters”. These exoplanet pairs can be found in binary star systems, with a planet circling around each of the twin stars.
This is a strange arrangement and one that scientists wanted to decrypt because they challenge theories of planet formation. This team of astronomers believes that they have the key to this puzzle and finds that the normal, long -term development of binary systems can of course lead to the formation of a hot Jupiter around every star.
The process examined by the team is known as Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (ZLK) migration. This corresponds to the idea that planets with unusual orbital angles can be influenced by the severity of another object over the period, which means that they become a hot Jupiter near their parent star.
“The ZLK mechanism is a kind of dance,” said the team leader and astronomer of Yale University, Malsa Rice. “In a binary system, the additional star can form and forgive the orbits of planets, which means that the planets migrate inwards.
“We show how planets can go through a mirrored migration process in binary systems so that both stars end with hot Jupiter.”
A look at binary stars from a hot Jupiter planet, but does he have a Spiegel image planet partner? | Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/T. Pyl
In order to draw their conclusion, rice and colleagues carried out a number of simulations of the development of binary stars with two planets that used the Grace Computing Cluster in the Yale Center for Research Computing with data from the NASA exoplanet archive and the European Space Agency (ESA)-Star-Tracking Mission GAIA.
“With the right code and sufficient computing power, we can examine how planets develop over billions – movements that no one could observe in a life, but that could still leave prints for us,” said Yale researcher Yurou Liu.
The unintentional consequence of the team research is that it makes the planetary formation models much more interesting.
“We would expect huge planets to form far from their guest stars,” said Liu. “This makes hot Jupiter both accessible and mysterious – and a worthwhile study.”
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As far as the hunt for further double hot Jupiders are concerned, the team suggests rethinking binary systems in which a hot Jupiter has already been discovered. The only catch is: these parent stars must have a separation that is not too close and not too far, but is just right.
“Our proposed mechanism works best when the stars have a moderate separation,” said team member and Yale Research Tiger LU. “They have to be far enough that they are still surrounded by huge planets around every star, but close enough together so that the two stars influence each other during the lifespan of the system.”
Goldillocks binary stars, someone?
The team’s research was published on June 10th in the Astrophysical Journal
