The impression of an artist of the unusual orbit of the exoplanet 2m1510 (AB) B around a pair of brown dwarfs
ESO / L. Sidewalk
In a first, a pair of unusual stars was revealed to have an equally unusual companion – an exoplanet that orbit them perpendicularly.
Astronomers may think that they know what is normal for stars and planets, “but the universe is very diverse”, says Amaury Triaud At the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He and his colleagues have unexpectedly found evidence of the rare configuration while analyzing the data collected by the very large telescope in Chile.
The two stars are brown dwarfs, which means that they are both little And very dark because they cannot support nuclear fusion and are often called failed stars or substrate objects. They follow orbits so that they continue to eclipse when they are seen from the earth. Researchers observed only one Brown dwarf binary Before.
When Triaud and his colleagues carefully analyzed the new binary system to determine the stars' masses and how they move, they found an unexpected signal in the data. In the end, the only physical scenario that could explain it was that involving an object the size of an orbit planet around the two stars, retracing an ellipse perpendicular to the stars orbits.
Triaud says that the orbits perpendicular are not completely unknown, but he and his colleagues did not expect to see one in this context. “The brown dwarfs are rare. Pairs of brown dwarfs are rare. The eclipses of brown dwarfs are even rarer and weak, so it is difficult to make measures, “he said. “This is where the surprise was that in a system that was far from ideal and rare in itself, we have this configuration.”
Twenty years ago, such configurations were considered to be science fiction, but now they have become scientific facts, said Katherine Blundell at the University of Oxford. “It's a very nice result,” she says. The details of the precession of the two stars argue that it “harmonograph In the sky ”is real. Study how they will disappear each other will pin more details on the movement of this particular trio in the future, explains Blundell.
While researchers want to know more about the exoplanet, named 2m1510 (AB) B, they can make comparisons with the fictitious tatooine Star WarsA world of the desert which has two suns. However 2m1510 (AB) B two suns would be a gradator, rushing his surface in something similar to a double dose of moonlight.
