Exoplanet with two ‘suns' is even more unique than Tatooine
When you imagine a stellar system and its orbiting planets, chances are it largely resembles our own solar system. In actuality, our cosmic neighborhood is actually a comparatively rare sight. Of the nearly 6,000 exoplanets documented so far, more than 75 percent exist in stellar orbits radically different from our own. One of the rarest variations is a binary system, in which the path of a planet revolves around two stars. However, the exoplanet 2M1510's binary system includes a slightly different pairing: brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are cosmic oddballs—while too large to classify as planets, they're also too small to truly meet the definition of a star. But at 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, they exhibit more than enough gravitational pull to draw objects into orbit. 2M1510 is one such object. However, in this case, there are two brown dwarfs involved here. The result, according to researchers, is an exoplanet that 'eccentrically orbits' the pair.
To confirm the rarely detected space oddity, astronomers utilized radial velocity calculations to examine data previously collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), as well as the European Space Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). This combination of tools and analyses allowed astronomers to bypass a longstanding physic issue called the three-body problem. This conundrum makes it extremely difficult to assess gravitational behavior between three objects interacting in space.
The resulting evidence strongly suggests 2M1510 orbits at a 90-degree polar angle, and moves perpendicular to the dwarfs' orbits in a never-before-seen way. Adding to its uniqueness, the brown dwarfs are eclipsing, meaning that one of them is always partially obscured when seen from Earth. This also makes it only the second eclipsing brown dwarf binary system ever documented.
'A planet orbiting not just a binary, but a binary brown dwarf, as well as being on a polar orbit is rather incredible and exciting,' Amaury Triaud, a study co-author and professor at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement.
According to an accompanying Science Advances 'Focus' feature, the system also 'provides strong, if indirect, evidence for the existence of one of the most exotic types of exoplanetary systems yet found.'
But as rare a find as it is, it's possible that 2M1510 once had an even more surreal skyscape. That's because they aren't only two brown dwarfs in the cosmic neighborhood. A third, more distant brown dwarf is located at the system's periphery. According to the study's authors, this hints at a time when a trio of brown dwarfs occupied the system's center before the gravitational forces pushed it out of the unit. At this point, however, only time will tell if a three-star planet makes it into a Star Wars film.
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