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A Star With Six Planets That Orbit Perfectly in Sync (nytimes.com) 30

Posted by msmash from the galaxy-far-far-away dept.
Astronomers have discovered six planets orbiting a bright star in perfect resonance. The star system, 100 light-years from Earth, was described on Wednesday in a paper published in the journal Nature. From a report: The discovery of the system could give astronomers a unique opportunity to trace the evolution of these worlds to when they first formed, and potentially offer insights into how our solar system got to be the way it is today. "It's like looking at a fossil," said Rafael Luque, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who led the study. "The orbits of the planets today are the same as they were a billion years ago."

Researchers think that when planets first form, their orbits around a star are in sync. That is, the time it takes for one planet to waltz around its host star might be the same amount of time it takes for a second planet to circle exactly twice, or exactly three times. Systems that line up like this are known as orbital resonances. But, despite the theory, finding resonances in the Milky Way is rare. Only 1 percent of planetary systems still preserve this symmetry.

Most of the time, planetary orbits get knocked out of sync by an event that upsets the gravitational balance of the system. That could be a close encounter with another star, the formation of a massive planet like Jupiter, or a giant impact from space on one planet that causes a ripple effect in other orbits. When this happens, Dr. Luque said, planetary orbits become too chaotic to mathematically describe, and knowledge of their evolution is indecipherable. Astronomers are lucky to find even one pair of exoplanets in resonance. But in the newly discovered star system, there are a whopping five pairs, because all six planets have orbits that are in sync with one another. Dr. Luque described it as "the 1 percent of the 1 percent."
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A Star With Six Planets That Orbit Perfectly in Sync

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  • I think she meant 15 pairs

    • Re: 15 pairs? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Thursday November 30, 2023 @01:53PM (#64044373)
      No, the planetary resonance is between each planet and it's two nearest neighbors, so planet a is resonant with planet b, and b is resonant with a and c, and so on, making 5 pairs. So planet a and planet f (for example) aren't directly paired, their orbital resonance occurs because of the chain of resonances between them rather than a direct resonance.

      • Doesn't just have to be the nearest planets, gravity drops off over distance but it's never zero. So Saturn could affect Mars slightly, especially over millions of years. Of course, in our solar system the distance between the planets as you go outwards is immense. The non-scale models doesn't make this clear: light from the sun reaches earth in a little over 8 minutes, and reaches Jupiter in 43 minutes, and reaches Neptune after 4 hours.

        For this particular system, the 6 planets are all closer to the sta

        • >So Saturn could affect Mars slightly, especially over millions of years

          Yes, but I presume Jupiter and Earth have stronger effects that pull it back into place.

          That's why resonances exist - it's mutual tugging of neighbouring bodies that gets them into those regular patterns.

          • stronger effects that pull it back into place.

            In orbital dynamics, there is no "place" to pull it back into. Everything is dynamic and nothing is long term stable.

            Jupiter, being the biggest, is the dominant influence in the inner solar system, but because Neptune gets closer to the outer solar system than Jupiter does, Neptune is relatively important in the outer solar system. But really, you do have to include all of the 8 planets when calculating them motions of the "small bodies".

  • Alternate site ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Thursday November 30, 2023 @01:17PM (#64044289)

    Time [time.com]

    • Thank you Captain!
      Screw you msmash for pointing to another vile paywalled site. Do you get a comission for that junk?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Thank you Captain! Screw you msmash for pointing to another vile paywalled site. Do you get a comission for that junk?

        Yes, they pay commission. The NY Times has a secret program to pay random Internet commenters large sums of money to post links. They were inspired by the ten million people paid by George Soros to post subtly stupid internet comments on politics. There's an entire multi-billion dollar industry of micro payments just to annoy micro penises like yourself.

      • I do not associate myself with this remark.

    • It's within a few words of the BBC News article [bbc.co.uk] I read last night, so I suspect it's an almost pure re-hash of a press release.

      There should be a paper somewhere ... ah, here it is : A resonant sextuplet of sub-Neptunes transiting the bright star HD 110067 [arxiv.org] by about 150 authors.

      Abstract : Planets with radii between that of the Earth and Neptune (hereafter referred to as sub-Neptunes) are found in close-in orbits around more than half of all Sun-like stars. Yet, their composition, formation, and evolution re

      • HD 110067 (TIC 347332255) is a bright K0-type star in the constellation of Coma Berenices with mass and radius of approximately 80 percent of the Sunâ(TM)s.

        That's a northern (celestial) hemisphere constellation. But with a fairly high HD (Henry Draper catalogue) number, it's not likely to be amenable to your diddy amateur telescope. Some of the radial velocity work was done with 20cm telescopes at Paranal (Chile)

        The orbital periods of planets HD 110067 b, c, and d (9.114, 13.673, and 20.519 days, resp

        • Oh, and an important footnote :

          Given the low mutual inclination of the system (below 1 deg), additional transiting planets may yet be found at periods longer than 70 days, which would correspond to orbits within or beyond the habitable zone of the star.

  • Some folks think that we know everything about the laws of physics, and what might exist out in the universe. This is an example of an extremely cool phenomenon that I don't think anyone would have expected, or really even dreamed of before we saw it ourselves. We don't know the smallest percentage about what is out there. We need to keep looking, seeking, exploring.

    • Some folks think that we know everything about the laws of physics, and what might exist out in the universe.

      Nobody thinks that given that we know 25% of the universe is Dark Matter and 70% is Dark Energy - neither of which we know anything about. The entirety of science so far comes from studying what makes up just 5% of the universe. We literally know that we don't know everything out there.

      • Errr, we do know that "Dark Matter" gravitates in the same way as the 5% or so of the universe that is just "matter" (you, me, the Sun, `Oumuamua). Which isn't everything but it also isn't nothing.

        • Errr, we do know that "Dark Matter" gravitates in the same way as the 5% or so of the universe that is just "matter"

          Actually, we are assuming that and using it to calculate the size of the missing mass. We do not _know_ it but in the absence of any evidence that DM gravitates differently, it is the simplest, and hence most reasonable, assumption...but no matter how reasonable it is, it is still an assumption.

  • This should walk that star across the universe like an off-balance washing machine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Without friction, the washing machine wouldn't walk across anything, it would be happy doing its dance in one spot.

  • Maybe this didn't happen by accident?

  • A lot of solar systems that have been observed have planets with highly eccentric orbits. Indeed, it's thought that in our solar system, Jupiter had such an orbit and destroyed the original inner planets, gaining its current orbit when Saturn formed. It's only then that new inner planets formed. And two of those collided to form the Earth and moon.

    • Indeed, it's thought that in our solar system, Jupiter had such an orbit and destroyed the original inner planets

      Citation required. I've not heard anyone (except you, here) making that claim.

      I think you're probably mis-remembering the "Grand Tack" model of the early (first ~20 million years) Solar system which hypothesises that Early Jupiter and Early Saturn ("Early" because they were still growing at the time) migrated inwards by several AU from their origin, until they entered a near-resonance (2:1 perio

  • Soon in your bookstores and later on your streaming channel.

  • They don't say anything about the homestar being under acceleration, so maybe they haven't moved in yet.

    • The Puppeteers moved AWAY from their home star. They had global warming problems (and, HT to Niven, he wrote about this in about 1970).
  • If it were actually perfect, they would (quite properly) interpret the result as discrediting some aspect of the data-gathering or processing. The physical universe does not arrive at mathematical perfection, ever.
    • If you read TFP (I've posted the Arxiv link up-thread), you'll see that all the parameters are given with reasonable error bars (asymmetric, in many cases). Though for the three best-characterised planets, their orbital ratios are "perfect" to the 4th decimal place, which is pretty good for a natural system. You've got to be pretty handy with a goniometer to get that good data off a crystal.

      Hmmm, I didn't notice a radial distance to the system anywhere in the paper, but I only skimmed it, not cover-to-cove

  • Show me 27 planets [imdb.com] and we'll talk.

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