UAZ: Astronomers Probe Young Star and Its Planets

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UAZ: Astronomers Probe Young Star and Its Planets

Post by bystander » Tue Apr 21, 2015 4:23 am

Astronomers Probe Young Star and Its Planets
University of Arizona | 2015 Apr 20

Taking advantage of the unprecedented sensitivity of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in southeastern Arizona, an international team of astronomers has obtained the first results from the LEECH exoplanets survey. The findings reveal new insights into the architecture of HR 8799, a "scaled-up" version of our solar system 130 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers have probed deeper than before into a planetary system 130 light-years from Earth. The observations mark the first results of a new exoplanet survey called LEECH, or LBT Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt, and are published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planetary system of HR8799, a young star only 30 million years old, was the first to be directly imaged, with three planets found in in 2008 and a fourth one in 2010. ...

The study was dedicated to studying the planet architecture of the HR 8799 system, according to the leading author, Anne-Lise Maire, a postdoctoral fellow at INAF-Padova Observatory in Padova, Italy. The team sought to constrain the orbital parameters of the four known giant planets and the physical properties of a putative fifth planet inside the known planets.

"To address the first point, we investigated in particular the types of resonances between the planet orbits," Maire explained. "From the resonances, we learn not only about the overall architecture of the planetary system, but also about the mass range of the planets.

"They cannot be too massive, or else the system would be dynamically unstable, as previous studies have suggested. Moreover, the presence of resonances between the planets indicates that they gravitationally interact with each other, which gives us a lower limit on their masses."

The results of this study favor an architecture for the system based on multiple double resonances — in other words, each of the three outer planets takes about twice as long to complete an orbit around the star as its neighbor closer to the star. ...

Astronomers Probe Inner Region of Young Star and its Planets
Large Binocular Telescope Observatory | 2015 Apr 20

The LEECH Exoplanet Imaging Survey. Further constraints on the planet architecture of the HR 8799 system - A.-L. Maire et al
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