Astronomers Spot A Rare Planet

Astronomers have found a new exoplanet that appears to defy expectations in almost every way.

Starting with its remarkable resemblance to the fictional sunsets of Tatooine, the desert planet from Star Wars.

This planet, known as HD 143811 AB b, orbits a pair of stars much closer than any other directly imaged planet in a binary system, yet its year is an incredible 300 Earth years long.

Located about 446 light-years away from Earth, this system immediately attracted the attention of scientists because it is extremely rare to find a planet orbiting a twin star through direct imaging.

This discovery gives scientists a unique chance to learn how planets develop in a dual gravitational environment instead of just one.

Jason Wang, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, and his team thoroughly reviewed previous observations to identify HD 143811 AB b rather than using fresh telescope data.

They reexamined data collected over an eight-year period by the Gemini South telescope using its Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a device specifically made to minimize starlight interference in order to detect faint planets.

At first, they didn’t expect to find much, having only identified one new planet from over 500 stars during GPI’s operational period.

After looking over data from 2016 to 2019 and checking it against follow-up observations from the W M Keck Observatory, researchers spotted a faint object’s steady movement that matched its host star, which is a major sign of a planet.

Together with an independent discovery from researchers at the University of Exeter, the team confirmed that the object’s light signature was in fact planetary, highlighting the challenges of identifying such distant worlds.

Further investigation showed that the planet is a gas giant about six times the size of Jupiter, still holding onto some heat from when it formed.

It’s around 13 million years old, in astronomical terms, it’s still considered a baby.

What makes this planet particularly fascinating is its extreme orbit. It orbits just six times closer to its binary stars than any other planet we’ve imaged in a similar system, yet the distance is still so great that it takes three centuries to finish one complete orbit.

The host stars themselves spin around each other quickly, completing a full rotation every 18 Earth days. It’s still unclear how a planet this size got into this peculiar arrangement.

DISCLAIMER: This article is derived from information available in the public domain.