Astronomers discover a double dose of mysterious hot Jupiters
Astronomers may have discovered the curious origins of the most curious planets in the universe, what are called “double jupiters”. The team behind research hopes that their discovery will help find more of these rare planets.
Hot Jupiter extra-solar planets, or “exoplanets”, are hot gas giants burning around the size of Jupiter or above this orbit so closely to their parental stars that one of their years can last less than a day of the earth. Although hot jupiters are rare, orbit only 1% of the stars, even rarer are “hot double jupiters”. These pairs of exoplanet are found in binary star systems with a planet in orbit around each of the twin stars.
It is a strange arrangement and that scientists wanted to decode because it seems to question the theories of the formation of the planet. This team of astronomers thinks that they can have the key to this puzzle, noting that normal and long -term evolution of binary systems can naturally lead to the formation of a hot Jupiter around each star.
The process studied by the team is known as migration von Zeipel-Lidov-Kozai (ZLK). This poses the idea that for periods, planets with unusual orbit or orbital angles can be influenced by the gravity of another object, leading them to become a hot Jupiter near their parent star.
“The ZLK mechanism is a kind of dance,” said team leader and astronomer from Yale University, Malena Rice, in a press release. “In a binary system, the additional star can shape and distort the orbits of the planets, which migrates the planets inwards.
“We show how planets in binary systems can undergo a migration process in mirror, so that the two stars are found with hot jupiters.”
In relation: Weird “stranded star”, the size of Jupiter is 2,000 degrees warmer than the sun
To achieve their conclusion, Rice and his colleagues have made a certain number of simulations of the evolution of binary stars with two planets using the grace computing group at the Yale Center for Research Computing with data from the NASA exoplanet mission and the stars monitoring mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).
“With the right code and enough calculation power, we can explore how the planets evolve over billions of years – movements that no human could monitor in a life, but that could still leave fingerprints to observe,” said Yale researcher Yurou Liu.
The unexpected consequence of the team’s research is that it makes planet training models much more interesting.
“We would expect the giant planets to form far from their host stars,” said Liu. “It makes jupiters hot both accessible and mysterious – and an interesting subject to study.”
Regarding hunting for more hot jupiters, the team suggests reviewing the binary systems in which a hot Jupiter has already been discovered. The only catch is: these parental stars must have a separation which is not too close and not too far, but just.
“Our proposed mechanism works better when the stars are at a moderate separation,” said the team member and Yale Research Tiger Lu. “They must be far enough for giant planets to be supposed to form around each star, but close enough to the two stars influenced during the life of the system.”
Goldilocks Binary Stars, someone?
The team’s research was published on June 10 in the magazine Astrophysics.
This article was initially published on Space.com.
