California Institute of Technology | 27 July 2010
A Pair of Interacting Exoplanet Pairs Around the Subgiants 24 Sextanis and HD200964 - JA Johnson et alHundreds of extrasolar planets have been found over the past decade and a half, most of them solitary worlds orbiting their parent star in seeming isolation. With further observation, however, one in three of these systems have been found to have two or more planets. Planets, it appears, come in bunches. Most of these systems contain planets that orbit too far from one another to feel each other's gravity. In just a handful of cases, planets have been found near enough to one another to interact gravitationally.
In one system-a planetary pair orbiting the massive, dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light-years from Earth-the intimate dance is closer and tighter than any previously seen. "This new planet pair came in an unexpected package," says Johnson.
Adds Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville, "A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be destroyed quickly if the planets weren't doing such a well synchronized dance. This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm."
A paper by Johnson, Ford, and their collaborators describing the planets and their intriguing orbital dynamics has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.
All of the four newly discovered exoplanets are gas giants more massive than Jupiter, and like most exoplanets were discovered by measuring the wobble, or Doppler shift, in the light emitted by their parent stars as the planets orbit around them. Surprisingly, however, the members of each pair are located remarkably close to one another.
For example, the distance between the planets orbiting HD 200964 occasionally is just .35 astronomical units (AU)-roughly 33 million miles-comparable to the distance between Earth and Mars. The planets orbiting the second star, 24 Sextanis (located 244 light-years from Earth) are .75 AU, or about 70 million miles. By comparison, Jupiter and Saturn are never less than 330 million miles apart.
Because of their large masses and close proximity, the exoplanet pairs exert a large gravitational force on each other. The gravitational tug between HD 200964's two planets, for example, is 3,000,000 times greater than the gravitational force between Earth and Mars, 700 times larger than that between the Earth and the moon, and 4 times larger than the pull of our sun on the Earth.
Unlike the gas giants in our own solar system, the new planets are located comparatively close to their stars. The planets orbiting 24 Sextanis have orbital periods of 455 days (1.25 years) and 910 days (2.5 years), and the companions to HD 200964 periods of 630 days (1.75 years) and 830 days (2.3 years). Jupiter, by contrast, takes just under 12 Earth years to make one pass around the sun.
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1007.4552 > 26 Jul 2010
