Locate the solar system with four planets

A group of astronomers from the University of Cambride discovered that a two million year old star had four giant planets around its orbit. The discovery raised questions about the formation and evolution of the solar system.

This is the first time that many gigantic planets have been detected in orbit around a young star. The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The star, known as CI Tau, is two million years old, which means it is still at the beginning of its life cycle. Like other young stars, it is surrounded by a vast ring of dust and ice, called protoplanetary disk, in which planets, moons, asteroids and other astronomical objects are formed.

This solar system is 500 light-years away. Of the earth. Astronomers have a special interest in CI Tau, because it contains a gas planet with a mbad 10 times higher than that of Jupiter, they call it "Hot Jupiter".

These discoveries are also confusing astronomers because, according to

To make this discovery, the researchers used the observatory ALMA (millimeter / submillimetric matrix of Atacama), a network of radio telescopes in the Chilean Andes , in search of Other planets.

ALMA images revealed three distinct gaps in the protoplanetary disk of debris surrounding the star, which, according to the researchers, would probably have been caused by the gravitational effects of the planets when they gravitate around the young star.

The four planets of CI Tau differ greatly in their orbits: the nearest (CI Tau b) is in the equivalent of the orbit of Mercury, while the farthest orbits are more than three times as much larger than that of Neptune.

The two outer planets have more or less the mbad of Saturn, while the two inner planets have up to 10 times the mbad of Jupiter.

For her part, Professor Cathie Clarke of the Cambridge University Institute of Astronomy and her co-authors commented:

"It is currently impossible to say whether the extreme planetary architecture seen in The Tau is common in hot jupiter systems because the way in which these sister-planets were detected by their effect on the protoplanetary disk would not work in older systems without protoplanetary disk. "