A star system has been found where planets orbit around two stars instead of one, bringing to mind the iconic binary sunset seen by Luke Skywalker on Tatooine in the original Star Wars movie.
It’s the 12th so-called circumbinary star system ever discovered, but only the second to have more than one planet. The first was found in 2021.
The star system, called TOI-1338, contains two two stars and is 1,320 light-years distant in the southern hemisphere constellation Pictor.
Published today in Nature Astronomy, a new paper from members of a research team called BEBOP (Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets) reveals the existence of the second planet, BEBOP-1c.
The first planet, TOI-1338b, was discovered in 202o using the transit method. Researchers could see the light of one of the stars dip slightly as the planet crossed its disk as seen by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). It’s thought to be rather like Neptune in the solar system.
However, BEBOP-1c was discovered using the radial velocity method—the detection by two telescopes Chile’s Atacama Desert of one of the stars wobbling, something only caused by the gravitational pull of planets around it.
“Only 12 circumbinary systems are known so far, and this is only the second that hosts more than one planet,” said David Martin, an astronomer and Sagan Fellow at the Ohio State University.
BEBOP-1c is also rather large, with a mass 65 times larger than Earth, but around five times less than Jupiter’s mass. It orbits both stars every 215 days.
“This was a difficult system to confirm, and our observations were interrupted by the COVID pandemic when telescopes in Chile closed for six months during a critical part of the planet’s orbit,” said lead author Dr Matthew Standing, who completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in the UK and is now a researcher at The Open University. “This part of the orbit only became observable again last year, when we finalised the detection.”
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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2023-06-12 23:15:00Z
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