ALL SCI-FI Forum Index ALL SCI-FI
The place to “find your people”.
 
 FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   RegisterRegister 
 ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 

The Planet that Should Not be - HD 106906 b

 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    ALL SCI-FI Forum Index -> SCIENCE now, add FICTION later
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Bogmeister
Galactic Fleet Vice Admiral (site admin)


Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 574

PostPosted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 2:09 pm    Post subject: The Planet that Should Not be - HD 106906 b Reply with quote



This is an artist’s conception of a young planet in a distant orbit around its host star. The star still harbors a debris disk, remnant material from star and planet formation, interior to the planet’s orbit (similar to the HD106906 system). (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

__________ The Planet That Shouldn't Be There


__________



Mysterious Alien Planet in Farthest-ever Orbit Discovered

The Planet that Should Not be - HD 106906 b 434174

Astronomers have discovered a planet 11 times the size of Jupiter revolving around its host star in the farthest-ever orbit observed so far among all the planetary systems known. Amazingly, the planet dubbed, HD 106906 b, is about 650 AU away from its host star, HD 106906 A. AU stands for Astronomical Units or the average distance between earth and sun. This is a massive distance, by solar standards.

In our planetary system, Neptune and Uranus are the farthest large planets. The newly discovered planet is about 20 times more distant from its host star than Neptune is from the sun. What is more baffling about this planet is that it is not cold unlike all the other planets that are distant from their parent stars. The surface temperature of HD 106906 b is about 1,500C, much hotter than even the Earth's core, and loosely comparable to the solar temperature of about 5,500C. HD 106906 b is glowing from the residual heat of its formation, researchers told Fox News.

The planet is also quite young as it was formed just 13 million years ago, compared to Earth's 4.5 billion years old. The planetary system appears to be relatively new as leftover material from the planet and star can still be detected. The one-of-a-kind planet was spotted by a team led by Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student from the University of Arizona. The discovery has puzzled astronomers while raising new questions about how such large planets are formed so far away from the host star.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," Bailey said.

According to commonly accepted theories, planets that orbit close to their host star, such as earth are formed by compression of leftover clumps of massive primordial disks of gas and dust that have collapsed and compressed into a star. But the process is too slow to explain how giant planets far away from their star are formed, the student said. An alternative hypothesis suggests that distant giant planets may form in ways similar to mini-binary star systems.

"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," Bailey explained.

However, the difference between the masses of two stars in a binary system is typically less than 10 to 1. "In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1," she said. She added: "This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories - just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star."

In the HD 106906 system, the star and planet may have collapsed independently, but the materials that clumped together to form the planet were insufficient for it to grow large enough to ignite into a new star, Bailey clarified.

The mysterious planet was discovered using the Magellan Adaptive Optics (MagAO) system and a Clio2 thermal infrared camera mounted on the Magellan telescope in Atacama Desert, Chile. "Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models," Bailey said. Besides, she said: "Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question."

"Every new directly detected planet pushes our understanding of how and where planets can form," said co-investigator Tiffany Meshkat, a graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. "Discoveries like HD 106906 b provide us with a deeper understanding of the diversity of other planetary systems."




BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 5:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That "gas giant" seems to be a failed stellar body. In other words, a mass of gas and dust that failed to reach the temperatures and pressures required to achieve fusion.
_________________
There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)


Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17020
Location: North Carolina

PostPosted: Sun Aug 25, 2019 11:50 am    Post subject: Re: The Planet that Should Not be - HD 106906 b Reply with quote

________________________________

Your exactly right, Gordo! Bogmeister's post has this paragraph towards the bottom.


Bogmeister wrote:
In the HD 106906 system, the star and planet may have collapsed independently, but the materials that clumped together to form the planet were insufficient for it to grow large enough to ignite into a new star . . .

I was curious about why Bogmeister didn't include a link to the article I naturally assumed he pasted for his post. But after searching the web, I didn't find a match for the text. I did find bits and pieces from several articles that were copied (like the quoted statements, of course), but it appears that Bogmeister did his usual fine job of carefully researching his subject and then crafting his own comments.

Bravo! Cool

I confess that I added the jpeg and the YouTube video from two different articles, neither of which matched the text of BoG's post (with those few exceptions I mentioned).

The Wikipedia article about HD 0106906 b has some fascinating infot. For example, the planet has a surface temperature of 2,800 °F which gives it a luminosity of about 0.02% of the Sun's. If the gas giant has moons — and surely a planet that size would have lots of them, several of which might even be earth sized — they would be warmed and partially lit by the gas giant.

In other words, the gas giant and its moons would be a compact version of the solar system. How cool is that, eh? Very Happy

Unfortunately there's a serious flaw in that idea.

The star is surrounded by a "debris disk" — basically a big, fat ring somewhat like Saturn's. This debris is far from the gas giant's orbit at it's apogee, because it's mean orbital radius is 60 billion miles, but when the gas giant is at perigee it comes remarkable close to the star! Shocked

The gas giant is more than 22 times further from the star as Neptune is from the Sun.



Here's what the Wikipedia article says about the planet's orbit around it's distant primary.
________________________________

The measurements obtained thus far are not adequate to evaluate its orbital properties. If its eccentricity is large enough, it might approach the outer edge of the primary's debris disk closely enough to interact with it at periastron. In such a case, the outer extent of the debris disk would be truncated at the inner edge of HD 106906 b's Hill sphere at periastron.
________________________________

Periastron means both the closest and farthest points in an orbit. (I didn't know that and had to look it up.)

This video shows just HOW close it comes!


______________ HD 106906 b Simulated Orbit


__________


Holy crap! The big bully grazes the "outer edge" of the debris cloud and scatters it all over the place as it moves back out into space!

If this happens every time it goes around the star, those lovely moons I was hoping for would get a shotgun blast of asteroids on every pass!

The orbital period of HD 106906 b is thought to be about 3,000 years, which would be enough time for a sentient species on a big Earth-like moon to develop advanced technology and be aware of what they were in for the next time the planet gets so close to the star.

The video above shows the fact that the length of time the planet spends whipping around the star is a fraction of the total 3,000 year period, because it's moving so much faster during that part of the orbit.

I noticed the time index on the video shows that one complete orbit takes 20 seconds, but the time it takes to pass close to the star is only about 1 second.

Assuming the video's representation of the speed is scaled accurately, that means the time spent in the "danger zone" of the orbit is 1/20th of 3,000 — or 150 years. Good Lord, a massive meteor shower that bombards all the moons for 150 years seems like enough time to destroy them all the first time it happened, much less repeating that assault every 150 years!

I guess my theory about the moons is in trouble, eh? Sad

But wouldn't the idea make a great sci-fi story about an advanced alien civilization which prepares itself to survive the 150-year asteroid bombardment?

Think of all the strategies they might use, like putting a force field around the planet! Or building giant space stations and moving the entire population into them while they orbit well outside the "debris cloud zone".



Perhaps they'd just build huge multi-generational ships and head for a nearby star with a friendlier solar climate and higher property values!



Anybody got more ideas we could discuss? Wink

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    ALL SCI-FI Forum Index -> SCIENCE now, add FICTION later All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group