University of Warwick, UK | 09 Nov 2010
Two planets orbiting the recently formed post-common envelope binary NN Serpentis - K Beuermann et alAstronomers at the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have helped discover an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker.
The University of Warwick and Sheffield astronomers played a key role in an international team that used two decades of observations from many telescopes around the world. The UK astronomers helped discover this “snooker like” star system through observations and analysis of data from an astronomical camera known as ULTRACAM designed by the British researchers on the team.
They looked at a binary star system which is 1670 light years away from Earth. NN Serpentis is actually a binary star system consisting of two stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, which orbit each other in an incredibly close, tight orbit. By lucky chance Earth sits in the same plane as this binary star system, so we can see the larger red dwarf eclipse the white dwarf every 3 hours and 7 minutes.
It was already thought that there may be at least one planet orbiting these two stars. However the University of Warwick and Sheffield astronomers were able to use these incredibly frequent eclipses to spot a pattern of small but significant irregularities in the orbit of stars and were able to help demonstrate that the pattern must be due to the presence and gravitational influence of two massive gas giant planets. The more massive gas giant is about 6 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the binary star every 15.5 years, the other orbits every 7.75 years and is about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter.
- Astronomy and Astrophysics 521 L60 (21 Oct 2010) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201015472
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1010.3608 > 18 Oct 2010