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There is now even more evidence that a bizarre star system perched on the nose of the constellation Orion can contain the rarest type of planet in the known universe: a single world orbiting three suns simultaneously.
The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located around 1,300 Light years of Earth, makes a tempting target for study; with three dusty orange rings nested within each other, the system literally looks like a giant bull’s eye in the sky. At the center of this target live three stars – two locked in a narrow binary orbit with each other, and a third swirling widely around the other two.
Three-star systems are rare in the cosmos, but GW Ori gets even stranger as astronomers take a closer look. In a 2020 article published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers took a close look at GW Ori with the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, and found that the system’s three dust rings are actually wrong. aligned with each other, with the innermost ring wobbling wildly in its orbit.
The team proposed that a young planet, or the creation of a planet, could upset the gravitational balance of GW Ori’s complex triple-ring arrangement. If the detection is confirmed, it would be the first triple sun planet (or “circumtriple” planet) in the known universe. Eat your heart Tatooine!
Now an article published on September 17 in the journal Monthly notices from the Royal Astronomical Society offers new evidence for the existence of this rare planet. The study’s authors conducted 3D simulations to model how mysterious gaps in the star system’s rings might have formed, based on observations of other dust rings (or “protoplanetary disks”) elsewhere in the world. ‘universe.
The team tested two hypotheses: either the rupture of the rings of GW Ori formed from the torque applied by the three twirling stars in the center of the system, or the rupture appeared when a planet formed in one of the rings.
The researchers concluded that there is not enough turbulence in the rings for the stellar couple theory to work. Rather, models suggest that the presence of a huge Jupiter-sized planet – or perhaps multiple planets – is the most likely explanation for the rings’ strange shape and behavior.
If future observations of the system confirm this theory, GW Ori could be “the first evidence of a circumtriple planet breaching in real time,” study lead author Jeremy Smallwood, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told the New York Times.
Unfortunately, a hypothetical observer of this maybe-planet would not actually be able to see the three suns rise and fall in the sky; the two stars at the center of the system move in such a narrow binary orbit that they would appear as a single large star, with the third one dipping around them, the researchers said.
But, if confirmed, the mere existence of this world would prove that planets can form under a wider range of conditions than scientists previously thought. If three suns and a flickering mishmash of dust rings aren’t enough to thwart a nascent planet, then who knows what it is.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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