Hubble Spots Exoplanet with a Wild Orbit
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Hubble spots exoplanet with a wild orbit:
We all grew up thinking there were nine planets in our solar system. Pluto got demoted, leaving just eight official planets, but in recent years some scientists have begun to believe that there is indeed a ninth big planet hanging out on the edges of the solar system, beyond our limits of detection. It's a theory that is supported by observations of smaller objects in the asteroid belt past Neptune, but nobody has actually seen this lost world.
Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a distant exoplanet that has an incredibly distorted orbit around its host stars. The planet, called HD 106906, orbits a double star located 336 light-years away, and NASA says it could help astronomers explain how our own still-mythical "Planet Nine" could exist.
[...] "This system draws a potentially unique comparison with our solar system," Meiji Nguyen, lead author of a study explaining the planet's orbit, said in a statement. "It's very widely separated from its host stars on an eccentric and highly misaligned orbit, just like the prediction for Planet Nine. This begs the question of how these planets formed and evolved to end up in their current configuration." The research was published in The Astronomical Journal. It's far from a confirmation of a planet nine existing in our solar system, but it's an interesting finding that does suggest it may be possible.
Journal Reference:
Meiji M. Nguyen, Robert J. De Rosa, and Paul Kalas. First Detection of Orbital Motion for HD 106906 b: A Wide-separation Exoplanet on a Planet Nine-like Orbit - IOPscience, The Astronomical Journal (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abc012)
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