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An artist’s depiction of a hot Jupiter planet orbiting its star. (Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)
Discovering Skewed planetary pathways around a star
It have been known to science that all the planets in our solar system follow a slightly slanted trajectory as they circle the sun. A new study shows that the phenomenon may not be unique to our cosmic neighborhood. The discovery suggests it doesn’t take much to make a planet’s orbit tilt, although exactly how it happens requires some investigation.
In our own solar system, for example, most planets (including Earth’s) are within about six degrees of the ecliptic, meaning the orbital plane around the sun. That’s a relatively small tilt. However, new research from Yale University shows that even “pristine” star systems far away from us, which haven’t been affected by such chaos, can have planets with tilted orbits as much as 20 degrees out.
“It tells us that we’re not a super-weird solar system. This is really like looking at ourselves in a funhouse mirror, and seeing how we fit into the bigger picture of the universe,” stated Malena Rice who serves as the lead author and Yale astronomer.
” HOT Jupiters” a term coined by Rice’s team, are a group of planets that are similar in size to our gas giant and travel extremely close to their parent stars. Their orbits tend to be much less than 10 days long, making them an interesting object of study.
“I’m trying to figure out why systems with hot Jupiters have such extremely tilted orbits,” Rice said. “When did they get tilted? Can they just be born that way? To find that out, we first need to find out what types of systems are not so dramatically tilted.”
Find out more about the details of solar system form on Space
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