{"id":441223,"date":"2011-06-14T18:07:14","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T18:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/06\/14\/astronomers-find-strange-planetary-system\/"},"modified":"2011-06-14T18:07:14","modified_gmt":"2011-06-14T18:07:14","slug":"astronomers-find-strange-planetary-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/06\/14\/astronomers-find-strange-planetary-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Find ‘Strange’ Planetary System"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"South<\/a><\/p>\n

14 June 2011<\/p>\n

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Johannesburg \u2014 Two astronomers in South Africa have found evidence for the existence of two giant planets orbiting a binary star system, the SA Astronomical Observatory said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The discovery by doctors Stephen Potter and Encarni Romero-Colmenero and collaborators, if confirmed, would be an example of a “really strange” planetary system, the SAAO said.<\/p>\n

“The two stars, referred to as a white dwarf and a red dwarf, are so close that they take only a couple of hours to orbit each other and would fit comfortably within our Sun.<\/p>\n

The system is oriented in such a way that the stars appear to eclipse each other once every orbit as viewed from Earth.<\/p>\n

Potter and his collaborators noticed that the eclipses were not occurring on time, but were sometimes too early or too late.<\/p>\n

This led them to hypothesise the presence of two giant planets whose gravitational effect would cause the stars’ orbit to “wobble” and consequently slightly alter the measured time between eclipses.<\/p>\n

The astronomers were also able to infer that the masses of the two planets must be at least six and eight times that of Jupiter and take 16 and five years respectively to orbit the two stars.<\/p>\n

The planets are too far away to be imaged directly.<\/p>\n

The binary star system, known as UZ For, would be an extremely inhospitable environment, the observatory said.<\/p>\n

“Due to their close proximity, the gravity of the white dwarf is constantly stealing material from the surface of the red dwarf in a continuous stream. This stream crashes onto the white dwarf where it gets super-heated to millions of degrees and subsequently floods the entire planetary system with enormous amounts of deadly X-ray radiation.”<\/p>\n

The discovery was made possible by new SAAO and Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) observations combined with archival data spanning 27 years, gathered from multiple observatories and satellites.<\/p>\n

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\nAstronomers Find ‘Strange’ Planetary System<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 June 2011 Johannesburg \u2014 Two astronomers in South Africa have found evidence for the existence of two giant planets orbiting a binary star system, the SA Astronomical Observatory said on Tuesday. The discovery by doctors Stephen Potter and Encarni Romero-Colmenero and collaborators, if confirmed, would be an example of a “really strange” planetary system, the SAAO said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":441224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-441223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-local-news"},"yoast_head":"\nAstronomers Find 'Strange' Planetary System - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/06\/14\/astronomers-find-strange-planetary-system\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Astronomers Find 'Strange' Planetary System - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"14 June 2011 Johannesburg \u2014 Two astronomers in South Africa have found evidence for the existence of two giant planets orbiting a binary star system, the SA Astronomical Observatory said on Tuesday. 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