Astronomers discover the perfect solar system – 11/29/2023 – Science

Astronomers have found a perfect solar system, created without the violent collisions that turned ours into a collection of planets of different sizes.

The system, a hundred light years away from Earth, has six planets, all approximately the same size. They have barely changed since their formation 12 billion years ago.

These constant conditions make it ideal for learning how these planets formed and whether there is life on them.

The research was published in the scientific journal Nature.

The creation of our own Solar System was a violent process. As planets formed, some collided with each other, affecting their orbits and leaving our system with giants like Jupiter and Saturn alongside relatively small planets like ours.

In the HD110067 solar system, as astronomers have officially called this other system, things are very different.

Orbits and sizes

Not only are the planets similar in size, but they rotate in sync, which is very different from the orbits of planets in our own Solar System.

In the time it takes for the innermost planet to go around the star three times, the next planet goes around twice, and so on until the fourth planet in the system. From there things change to a 4:3 pattern of relative orbit speeds for the last two planets.

This intricate planetary choreography is so precise that researchers created a cyclical piece of music, similar to a Philip Glass-style composition, with notes and rhythms corresponding to each planet and its orbital periods.

Researcher Rafael Luque, from the University of Chicago, who led the research, was the one who described HD110067 as a perfect solar system.

“It’s ideal for studying how planets are created, because this solar system didn’t have the chaotic beginning that ours did and hasn’t been affected since its formation.”

Researcher Marina Lafarga-Magro, from the University of Warwick, said the system is beautiful and unique.

“It’s really exciting to see something no one has seen before,” she told BBC News.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered thousands of solar systems. But none of them are as well suited to studying how planets formed.

The nearly identical size of the planets and the undisturbed nature of the system are key to astronomers because they make it much easier to compare and contrast them. This will help build a picture of how they formed and evolved.

The system also has a bright star that will facilitate the search for signs of life in the planets’ atmospheres.

All six new planets are what astronomers call “sub-Neptunes,” which are larger than Earth and smaller than the planet Neptune (which is four times wider than Earth). The six newly discovered planets are between two and three times the size of Earth.

Interest in the new discoveries has increased since the discovery in September that a sub-Neptune planet, called K2-18b, in another star system, has an atmosphere with evidence of a gas that on Earth is produced by living organisms. Astronomers call this a biosignature.

They don’t know if they are mostly made of rock, gas or water, or if they provide conditions for life.

Discovering these details is “one of the hottest topics in the field,” according to Luque, adding that the discovery of HD110067 gives his team the perfect opportunity to answer this question relatively quickly.

“It could be a matter of less than ten years,” he told BBC News.

“We know the planets, we know where they are, we just need a little more time, but it will happen.”

If the team’s next phase of observations indicates that the sub-Neptunes could also harbor life, this will greatly increase the number of possible habitable planets and therefore increase the chances of detecting signs of life on another world sooner or later.

The race is now on to detect biosignatures in one of these six new sub-Neptunes, or in dozens of others detected by other researchers. With a battery of new telescopes with improved capabilities and others about to come into operation, many astronomers believe we may not have to wait long to move forward with this study.

The planets were detected using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Characterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops), from the European Space Agency (ESA).