With all that we have learned about our own solar system, especially in the last few decades, researchers still face many unanswered questions. One of them is the so-called Planet Nine. The Planet Nine hypothesis states that a giant planet in our solar system orbits at a great distance from the Sun.
No one has ever observed a projected planet; Evidence for this is in a body cluster that orbits the sun 250 times more than the earth. These objects are used for extreme trans-Neptune objects, e-TNO. According to the hypothesis, the gravity of Planet Nai is the cause of this e-TNO Unusual clusters of are responsible for orbit.
Now astronomers have discovered a distant solar system with its own planet Nine, and it is breathing new life into the discovery hypothesis.
The planet is named HD 106906B, and orbits a binary star 336 light years away. It has about 11 Gupiters and orbits the stars 730 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It is a very distant orbit.
The paper presenting these results is titled, “First Investigation of Orbital Motion for HD 106906B: Wide-Depletion Exoplanet on Orbit’s Gem-Planet Nine.” The first author was Meiji M. From Nguyen, University of California, Berkeley. It is published in The Astronomical Journal.
The story of this discovery begins again in 2004 when Hubey first observed the HD 106906B. At the time, little was known about the system. Hubble observations were follow-up observations based on indirect evidence that a hot dust disk surrounds a star, and astronomers wanted to know more about that disk.
Paul Klaus, UC Berkeley, is one of the authors of the new paper. In an email exchange with Universe Today, explained the interesting back story of Class HD 106906B. “The first Hubble observation was made on July 24, 2004. The purpose was to follow up on indirect evidence that the central star is surrounded by dust disks, such as the planetary belt and the Kuiper belt within our solar system.”
Klaas explained, “At the time, we didn’t know if the star was actually a binary star, or we didn’t know that one of the background stars in the field of view was an extrasolar planet instead of a true background star.” “What we did know was that the Star HD 106906 was a source of very infrared radiation, and we speculated that there was a hot dust disc around it.”
Astronomers were looking for a dust disk when Hubble pointed to the system in 2004, but they could not find it, although they were looking at it. “The disc is so distorted that it is difficult to identify it as a disc and can be mistaken for a sound artifact,” Klaus said.
They also looked exactly at the planet but did not recognize it as one. Instead, they thought it was a background star, partly because it orbits at an extreme distance from the stars of the system. “The planet is so far away from the binary star that one would expect to find a background star at this distant location instead of any planet,” Klaus said.
The story will now jump to the year 201 when astronomers used the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile to study the system. They captured many images over time, which showed the movement. Klaus explains: “HD 106906 (binary star) orbits in the sky compared to more distant background stars. They found that the HD 106906B also moved in the same direction and distance as the binary. It was not a background star, but a giant planet physically associated with binary. ”
From here Gemini enters the Planet Imager (GPI) story. The GPI on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile is a very advanced optics system. It performs both spectroscopic and polarimetric observations. Its specialty is that it detects gas giants that are closer to the stars than anything else. It is also excellent at studying discs of material like the binary star HD 106906.
“Then, in a research paper I took in 2015, we used an advanced ground-based instrument called the Gemini Planet Imager to directly print the dust disk surrounding the binary,” Klaus said. “Looking back at the Hubble Data Archive, I learned that the disk was found 11 years ago. It was a system of truly distorted planets instead of the artifact of sound. “
Then during 2017 and 2018, astronomers turned Hubble to the HD 106906 system again in an attempt to illustrate the system and its disk in more detail. “I was the chief investigator of the 2017 observations,” Klaus said. In our new work, we measured the planet’s motion for the first time compared to its host star using 14-year Hubble data starting in 2004 and ending in 2018. We found that HD 106906b For one year is about 15,000 years
And this is where the story includes another observatory and its data: ESA’s Gaia mission. Klaus explains: “It would have been impossible to measure this speed for less than 14 years if it weren’t for the data from another observatory called Gaia, which gave us the exact location of the background stars, so it would provide a very nice reference grid to measure. The situation changes over time. “
Astronomers believe that the planet’s slow orbit is due to the distance from the stars and the weak force of gravity. The orbit is also inclined and elongated, and it is well out of the dusty disk around the stars. The shape of the debris disk itself is also unusual, which made it difficult to find, and it is due to a gravitational tug from the planet.
“To illustrate why this is so strange, we can just look at our own solar system and see that all the planets are in approximately the same plane,” lead author Nguyen said in a press release. “If science were to say that, Jupiter is only about 0 degrees like an airplane, it orbits every other planet. So this kind of trend raises all sorts of questions about how the HD 106906B ended up in orbit so far. ”
What is the cause of this weird pedal disc? The probable cause is the planet itself. It has probably built closer than its stars, and then it has migrated out of town. It was then subjected to a pull from a gas disc around the stars, which caused its orbit to rot. So it would have really come closer to the stars, in the beginning.
But the two stars could have a complex force of gravity, and those forces probably kicked the planet out of its warmth. It was almost out of the system, wreaking havoc in interstellar space as a rogue planet. Instead, he took an eccentric orbit. All that activity has put the dust disc in its unusual shape.
Then, astronomers think, a rogue star passed by. From that encounter the orbit of the HD 106906B stabilized, and the system became what we now see. Candidate stars were also identified by the Gaia Mission who may be responsible, which reinforced this understanding.
There are similarities between the HD 106906B and our own solar system’s imaginary Planet Nine. In the case of Planet Nine, it may also be close to the Sun, but it has since been expelled by interaction with Jupiter. That interaction probably led to the eruption of Planet Nine in areas close to the Solar System outside of Pluto’s orbit. The passing star could play a similar role to that by stabilizing it in the orbit of HD 106906B.
Klaus explains, “It looks like a time machine going back billions.6 billion years to our own solar system to see when our young solar system was dynamically active and everything was rearranging in amazement. . “
But one stubborn fact remains: there is no direct evidence for Planet Nine. There is only conditional evidence.
But scientific development starts with a lot more. Neptune was found with mathematics, long before there were any direct observations. And it was discovered partly due to irregularities in the orbit of its neighbor Uranus. So orbital malformations have previously led to the discovery of planets.
We can observe our own solar system, which we can do more than anyone else, and we know that there is a group of orbital bodies with unusual clusters. Could any Planet Nine be responsible for them? Maybe.
Robert de Rosa, a member of the team at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile, explained, “Despite the lack of discovery of Planet Nine to date, planetary orbit can be estimated based on its effect on various So objects in the outer solar system. Who led the analysis of the study. “This suggests that if a planet were to actually be responsible for what we observe in the orbits of trans-Neptune objects, it must have a diagonal orbit relative to the solar system’s plane. This prediction of the orbit of Planet Nine is similar to what we are seeing with the HD 106906B. “
The Planet Nine guess is the only possible explanation. Some astronomers believe that the combined mass of ETNOs can provide the gravity needed for their orbit. Others suggest that Planet Nine may actually be a primitive black hole rather than a planet. Others think there may be an observational bias at work here, and the orbital clustering of ETNOs is part of the picture.
But the discovery of the HD 106906B certainly sheds new light on the Planet Nine hypothesis. We now know that a giant planet could end up in an extremely vast orbit. Next, perhaps we can find small clusters of HD 106906B’s own body, the presence of which has shaped the orbit. But it is probably beyond the reach of our observations.
“There are still a lot of open questions about this system.”
Robert D. Rosa, co-author, ESO.
Even better, maybe we should actually observe Planet Nine. But for that, we may have to wait for another jump in observation capabilities.
Speaking of the HD 106906 system, we can only start studying it, and there are a lot of unanswered questions.
De Rosa added, “There are still a lot of open questions about this system. “For example, we do not know exactly where and how the planet was formed. Although we have first measured the speed of orbit, there are still large uncertainties on the various rotation parameters. It is likely that both observers and theorists will study HD 106906 for years, which could solve many of the mysteries of this remarkable planetary system. ”
