A strange planet is orbiting the opposite between two stars

After two decades of debate, the investigation confirms that a strange binary star system has an equally strange planetary companion.

According to, researchers finally understand how a pair of stars can maintain a Stable orbital dance with a dodge planet.

Em 2004, David Rammfrom the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, detected a mysterious repetitive sign while observing the movement of a pair of stars in a system called Nu octantis.

This began a long debate about whether the signal was proof that this system included a planet about twice the size of Jupiter, which some physicists considered impossible due to the size and proximity of the two stars.

Now, Copper e Man hi lee From the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues presented the most conclusive evidence that Nu Octantis is indeed a trio and not a duo.

The key observation was that the naked planet octantis is retrograde -The planet and a star orbit both the second star, but do it in opposite directions, with the planet to have the tight orbit around the second star.

Lee says that that is unusualbut makes the system configuration stable – although it means that the planet repeatedly moves through the narrow space between the two stars.

Your team has managed to determine this very certainly thanks to improved measurement devices, such as the HARPS SPELLS In the 3.6 meter telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile. The fact that the sign of Planet Ter persisted during years of observation also helped.

“We are almost sure that [o planeta] It’s real, Because if it were something like star activity, it shouldn’t be so consistent in data years, ”says Lee.

But this moving planet is not the only exotic characteristic of Nu Octantis. Researchers used the Very Large Telescope of the Southern European ObservatoryAlso in Chile, to determine that one of its stars is a white dwarf, which means that it has come to the end of its life cycle, becoming denser and smaller.

Lee says this complicates the story of the Octantis Nu Trio because the mathematical models of his past show that the current orbit of the planet was impossible when this star was Younger, larger and brighter.

So either the planet orbit the two stars at the same time, but then changed a trajectory radically when one of the two stars became a white dwarf, or was formed from the mass that the star ejected when he turned into a white dwarf.

Future observations, and more mathematical modelingThey may be able to identify which of these scenarios is most likely to have occurred, but both are quite innovative, says Lee.

For centuries, star observers have been used to Simple cosmic arrangementslike the solar system, where all planets orbit a central star in the same direction and with tempered spacing, but naked octantis breaks all these conventions, says Manfred Cuntz from the University of Texas in Arlington.

“It invites scientists to consider a wider range of star and planet scenarios, both with regard to training and evolution,” he says.