Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
European Southern Observatory | 2016 Jun 17
[img3="Wide-field View of the Open Star Cluster Messier 67An international team of astronomers have found that there are far more planets of the hot Jupiter type than expected in a cluster of stars called Messier 67. This surprising result was obtained after long-term observations using a number of telescopes and instruments, which led to the discovery of three giant planets. The denser environment in a cluster will cause more frequent interactions between planets and nearby stars, which may explain the excess of hot Jupiters.
Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1402c.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The international team led by Roberto Saglia at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Luca Pasquini at ESO has spent several years collecting high-precision measurements of 88 stars in Messier 67. This open star cluster is about the same age as the Sun and it is thought that the Solar System arose in a similarly dense environment.
The team used HARPS at the ESO La Silla 3.6m telescope as well as the High Resolution Spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas, USA, to look for the signatures of giant planets on short-period orbits, hoping to see the tell-tale “wobble” of a star caused by the presence of a massive object in a close orbit, a kind of planet known as a hot Jupiters. This hot Jupiter signature has now been found for a total of three stars in the cluster alongside earlier evidence for several other planets. ...
The study found that hot Jupiters are more common around stars in Messier 67 than is the case for stars outside of clusters. ...
Search for Giant Planets in M67 III: Excess of Hot Jupiters in Dense Open Clusters - A. Brucalassi et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1606.05247 > 16 Jun 2016