Astronomers have used data from the Kepler Space Telescope to give the clearest understanding yet of a class of exoplanets called Warm Jupiters, revealing that many have unexpected planetary companions.
The team’s analysis, published July 10th in the Astrophysical Journal, provides strong evidence of the existence of two distinct types of Warm Jupiters, each with their own formation and dynamical history.
The two types include those that have companions and thus, likely formed where we find them today; and those with no companions that likely migrated to their current positions.
According to lead-author Chelsea Huang, a Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto, “Our findings suggest that a big fraction of Warm Jupiters cannot have migrated to their current positions dynamically and that it would be a good idea to consider more seriously that they formed where we find them.”
Warm Jupiters are large, gas-giant exoplanets—planets found around stars other than the Sun. They are comparable in size to the gas-giants in our Solar System. But unlike the Sun’s family of giant planets, Warm Jupiters orbit their parent stars at roughly the same distance that Mercury, Venus, and the Earth circle the Sun. They take 10 to two hundred days to complete a single orbit.
Because of their proximity to their parent stars, they are warmer than our system’s cold gas giants—though not as hot as Hot Jupiters, which are typically closer to their parent stars than Mercury.
It has generally been thought that Warm Jupiters didn’t form where we find them today; they are too close to their parent stars to have accumulated large, gas-giant-like atmospheres. So, it appeared likely that they formed in the outer reaches of their planetary systems and migrated inward to their current positions, and might in fact continue their inward journey to become Hot Jupiters. On such a migration, the gravity of any Warm Jupiter would have disturbed neighboring or companion planets, ejecting them from the system.
But, instead of finding “lonely,” companion-less Warm Jupiters, the team found that 11 of the 27 targets they studied have companions ranging in size from Earth-like to Neptune-like.
“And when we take into account that there is more analysis to come,” says Huang, “the number of Warm Jupiters with smaller neighbors may be even higher. We may find that more than half have companions.”
Reference: “Warm Jupiters are less lonely than hot Jupiters” by Chelsea Huang, Yanqin Wu and Amaury H. M. J. Triaud, 6 July 2016, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/825/2/98
arXiv:1601.05095
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1 Comment
Who said that Jupiters are lonely in our galaxy. In solar system itself we have four Jupiters which are Jupiter, Saturn. Uranus and Neptune all being failed stars with a ring of gases and planets around them. If our solar system itself is having four Jupiters the exo-planets of other stars should also be having many many Jupiters around them more than the isolated planets. When stars are formed equal number of stars should have failed and they become Jupiters around their more massive stars. The condensation of gases by gravitation will follow only one theory. Thank You.