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Short Sharp Science
10:31 13 April 2012
One Per Cent
Space
New Scientist TV
Lisa Grossman, reporter
CultureLab
It's a shame about Pluto. If it still counted as a planet, our sun would still be among the recordholders in the planet stakes.
Instead, that crown may have just been stolen by HD 10180, a star 130 light years away that
has mass, temperature, brightness and chemistry similar to the sun. A new report sees evidence
for up to nine planets in HD 10180's family, all of which are more massive than the Earth. The
finding is one of two suggesting our solar system may not be as weird as we thought.
After our sun, we used to think the stars with the most planets were Kepler-11 and HD 10180:,
each appeared to have six orbiting worlds. Then Mikko Tuomi, an astronomer at the University of
Hertfordshire, UK, re-examined observations of HD 10180 from the HARPS (High Accuracy
Radial velocity Planet Searcher) spectrograph at the La Silla observatory in Chile. He confirmed
the presence of a suspected seventh planet and found new evidence of two more, which would
bring the total up to nine.
The suggestion that other solar systems have similar numbers of planets to our own fits with
growing evidence that ours is not as freakish as earlier evidence suggested.
The early days of exoplanet hunting mostly turned up bizarre and exotic beasts like hot Jupiters,
behemoths many times larger than Jupiter that orbit scorchingly close to their stars, often in
single-planet families. Sometimes their orbits were askance, titled at crazy angles with respect to
the star's axis of rotation.
The new zoo of planets threw doubt on conventional models of planet formation. Based only on
our own crowded but orderly family of planets, astronomers had assumed that planets coalesce
calmly out of a flat disc of gas and dust that circled the star like a record. Hot Jupiters are too
massive to have formed as close to their stars as they are now, implying a history of planeton-planet violence in which bigger planets tossed smaller ones out in order to migrate inward.
Now though, it seems our orderly orbits might not be so odd. A second study out this week from
the EXOEarths collaboration compared data from HARPS, which is sensitive to all planetary
systems regardless of their orientation with respect to Earth, and the Kepler Space Telescope,
which can see planets only if they transit, or cross in front of their star as seen from Earth. If
Kepler sees multiple transits across the same star, that means there must be two or more
planets in more or less the same orbital plane.
EXOEarths team member Pedro Figueira of the University of Porto, Portugal, and colleagues
calculated how many such systems Kepler should see, given the frequency of all planetary seen
by HARPS. The results matched what Kepler actually sees.
That means that planets' orbits are probably more often aligned than not, and suggests that
planets often form in a disc without much violent jostling.
"These results show us that the way our solar system formed must be common," Figueira said,
according to a press release. "Its structure is the same as the other planetary systems we
studied, with all planets orbiting roughly in the same plane."
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Recent comments
By Russell Horwood
New planet record suggests our solar system is
normal:
The early evidence never suggested that our system was
unusual. When you start looking for plan...
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By Tony Marshallsay
New planet record suggests our solar system is
normal:
The fact that the planets in our solar system are aligned in
one plane does not necessarily imp...
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Today on New Scientist: 12
April 2012
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks
these rules then please let us know, quoting the comment in question.
Tony Marshallsay on April 13, 2012 12:13 PM
The fact that the planets in our solar system are aligned in one plane does not necessarily imply
that they were formed by coalescence, rather than being simply captured "free planets". In fact,
the motleyness of the collection would tend to suggest the latter.
If they were previously free wanderers, they would be expected to have initial orbits in whatever
plane they were captured. Once captured, they would exert gravitational pulls on each other
which, under what I call the guitar string principle, would over time tend to pull them into one
plane. The orientation of this equilibrium plane with respect to the solar axis would probably be
determined by one or two major planets; and any tendency to move out of it would result in
restoring gravitational pulls. However the arrival of any new cosmic wanderer could, of course,
upset the whole applecart.
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Russell Horwood on April 13, 2012 1:46 PM
The early evidence never suggested that our system was unusual. When you start looking for
planets you are obviously going to start finding large planets close to their parent stars simply
because they are easier to see. Anyone whom ever thought this was a fair indication of
Universal systems should not be working in science, or even the media.
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