WD 1856B, a potential planet of Jupiter, orbits its obscure white dwarf star every 36 hours and is about seven times larger. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Violent events leading up to the death of a star take away any of the planets. Got new Jupiter-Size object The object may have occurred long after the star’s death.
International team of astronomers using NASATransit of the Explanate Survey Satellite (TESS) And the retired Spitzer Space Telescope has reported that it may be the first intact planet to be seen orbiting nearby. White dwarf, The Sun-like star ga ense left, only 40% larger than Earth.
The Jupiter-sized object object, known as WD 1856B, is about seven times larger than the white dwarf, named WD 1856 + 534. It orbits the stars every 34 hours, which is 60 times faster than Mercury orbiting our Sun.
How did the giant planet survive the violent process that turned its parent star into a white dwarf? After discovering an object object the size of Jupiter, astronomers have a few ideas, 1856 b. Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“WD 1856B somehow got very close to its white dwarf and could only stay in one piece,” said Rewandrew Vanderberg, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The white dwarf formation process destroys nearby planets, and whatever comes closer later is usually released by the star’s massive gravity. Arrived on the way. “
A paper about the system, led by Wonderberg and including several NASA co-authors, is published in the September 16, 2020 issue. Nature.
TES monitors the vast bottom of the sky known as the sector for about a month at a time. This long gaze allows a satellite to explore satellites or the world outside our solar system, by altering the brightness of the stars that occur when a planet passes in front of its star, or when it transitions.
The satellite observed WD 1856B in the northern constellation Draco about 80 light-years away. It orbits a nice, cool, white quiet dwarf of about 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers), may be 10 billion years old, and is a distant member of the Triple Star system.
When a sun-like star runs out of fuel, it cools hundreds to thousands of times its original size, forming a cool red giant star. Eventually, it expels the outer layers of its gas, losing 80% of its mass. The rest of the warm core becomes a white dwarf. Any typical nearby objects are normally included and incinerated during this process, which would have included WD 1856B in its current orbit in this system. Wonderberg and his colleagues estimate that the origin of a potential planet should be at least 50 times farther from its current location.
“We have known for a long time that after the birth of the white dwarf, distant small objects such as asteroids and comets could scatter these stars inward. They are usually pulled by the intense gravity of a white dwarf and turned into a debris disk, ”said Sii Zhou, an assistant astronomer at the International Gemini Observatory in the Hills of Hawaii. . “That’s why I was so excited when Andrew told me about this system. We have seen signs that the planets may also be scattered inwards, but this looks like we have seen a planet that made the whole journey intact. “
The team suggests several scenarios that could push WD 1856B onto an elliptical path around a white dwarf. This path would have become more circular over time, as the star’s gravity pulls the object, creating tremendous tides that dissolve the dissonance of its orbit.
“Probably the case involves some other Jupiter-sized bodies close to the original orbit of WD 1856B,” said Juliet Baker, a 51-page Pegasus B Fellow of Planetary Science at Co-Latex, Pasadena. “Objects The gravitational effect of objects, which allows you to easily stabilize a planet most of the time you need to inward. But this time, we still have more principles than data points. “
Other possible scenarios include two other stars in the system, the red dwarf G229-20A and B, a flyby of billions of years and a rogue star around the system, gradually involving a gravitational tug. The Wonderberg team thinks these and other revelations are less likely because they need a well-adjusted position to achieve the same effects as the potentially giant allied planets.
Jupiter-sized objects can occupy a large number of people, however, thousands of times less mass than Earth, many times more than planets. There is another brown dwarf, which breaks the line between the planet and the stars. Scientists usually turn to radial velocity observations to measure a set of objects, which may indicate its composition and nature. This method works by studying how an orbiting object tugs its star and changes the color of its light. But in this case, the white dwarf is so old that its light has become too vague and too typical for scientists to find significant changes.
Instead, the team inspected the system in infrared using Spitzer a few months before the telescope diminished. If the WD 1856B was a brown dwarf or a low-mass star, it would be out of its own infrared glow. This means that Spitzer would record luminous transmissions more than if the object were a planet that intercepts light instead of emitting it. When the researchers compared Spencer’s data with visible light transition observations taken with the Gran Telescopio Canaria in the Canary Islands of Spain, they found no discernible difference. That, combined with other information about the star’s age and system, led them to conclude that WD1856B is probably 14 times the size of Jupiter. Future research and observations may be able to confirm this conclusion.
Exploring the potential world revolving around the white dwarf, co-authors Lisa Kaltenagar, Wonderberg and others will consider suggestions for studying the atmosphere of a small rocky world under similar conditions. For example, suppose the Earth-shaped planet WD was located in an orbital range around 1856 where water might exist on its surface. Using the corresponding observations, the researchers show that NASA’s next James Webb Web Space Telescope Water and carbon dioxide can be detected on a projected world by observing only five transitions.
The results of the calculations, led by Kaltenagar and Ryan D. Cadonald, have been published at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Astrophysical Journal Letters And available online.
“More impressively, the web could probably detect gas compounds indicating biological activity on such a world in as many as 25 transitions,” said Kaltenegar, director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute. “WD 1856B suggests that the planets may have survived the chaotic history of the white dwarf. Under the right conditions, those worlds could maintain favorable conditions for life for longer than the time standard predicted for Earth. Now we can discover many new interesting possibilities of worlds revolving around the cores of these dead stars. “
There is currently no evidence to suggest that there are other worlds in the system, but it is possible that additional planets exist and have not yet been discovered. They may have orbits that TESS observes in an area or is indicated in a way that does not transit. The white dwarf is also so small that the system is very unlikely to be transported from distant planets.
Reference: “A giant planet candidate infecting the White Dwarf” Andrew Vanderberg, Saul A. Rapport, Sii Zoo, Ian JM Crossfield, Juliet c. Baker, Bruce Gary, Felipe Murgas, Simon Bluin, Thomas G. K, Enrique Paley, Carl Melis, Brett M. Morris, Laura Kreidberg, Varuzan Gorgian, Caroline V. Morley, Andrew W. Mann, Hannu Parvien, Logan A. Pierce, Elizabeth R. Newton, Andrea Carillo, Ben Zuckerman, Lorne Nelson, Greg Zeiman, Warren R. Brown, Rene Tronsgaard, Beth Klein, George R. Ricker, Roland K. Wanderspeck, David W. Latham, Sara Sier, Joshua n. Win, John M. Jenkins, Fred C. Adams, Bjorn Banek, David Berardo, Lars a. Buchave, Douglas a. Caldwell, Jesse L. Christian, Karen A. Collins, Kinnickel d. Cologne, Tansu Dylan, John Dotty, Alexandra E. Doyle, Diana Dragomir, Courtney Dressing, Patrick Dufour, Akihiko Fukui, Ana Gliden, Natalia M. Guerrero, Xuing Guo, Kevin Hang, Andrea I. Henriquesen, Chelsea x. Huang, Lisa Kaltenagar, Stephen R. Ken, John a. Lewis, Jack J. L. Issuer, Farisa Morless, Norio Narita, Joshua Pepper, Mark E. Rose, Jeffrey C. Smith, Kevan G. Station and Liang Yu, 16 September 2020, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-020-2713-y
TESS is a NASA astrophysics explorer mission that operates and manages MIT Powered by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Greenbelt, Maryland. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, located in Falls Church, Virginia, NASA’s AIIMS Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lincoln Laboratories in MIT. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and worldwide observers are participating in the mission.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California conducted the Spitzer mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Spitzer Data Archive, located in the Infrared Science Archive at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, continues to analyze Spitzer science data by the science community. Science operations were carried out at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. The spacecraft’s operation was based on the Leheid Kehid Martin space in Littleton, Colorado. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
