SPACE — We live in the age of exoplanet discovery. One thing you have to know is don’t be surprised by the types of exoplanets that continue to be discovered. Sometimes, they have never appeared in anyone’s imagination.
Now, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet in a circumbinary disk around a binary star (two star system). The extraordinary thing is that the disk is in a polar configuration. This means that the exoplanet moves around its binary star in a circumpolar orbit, and this is the first thing scientists have discovered.
AC Herculis (AC Her) is a binary star approximately 4,200 light years away. The main star has been well studied, while its companion is not visible.
It has an unusual, although previously unheard of, polar circumbinary gas disk. In a new paper, the research team presents evidence for the existence of such polar circumbinary exoplanets.
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The paper entitled ‘AC Her: Evidence of the First Polar Circumbinary Planet’ will be published in The Astrophysical Journal, but is already available on the pre-print site arxiv. The lead author is Rebecca Martin of the Nevada Center for Astrophysics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“We examined the binary geometry of post-asymptotic giant (AGB) and AC Her star types
circumbinary disk. “We show that the observations depict the binary’s orbit perpendicular to the disk,” the researchers wrote.
The author explains that the disk is approaching a stable polar alignment and has a large inner radius. It shows that the circumbinary disk has gaps that indicate the presence of a planet.
“The most likely explanation for the dust’s enormous inner radius is the presence of planets within the circumbinary disk,” they wrote.
There is some uncertainty regarding this conclusion. Among them, the size of the disk and the cavity where the star is in the center. In a circumpolar disk, there are different forces and forces that act to form the star’s cavity.
“The cavity size of a circumbinary gas disk depends on the separation of the binary, the eccentricity of the binary, and the inclination of the disk relative to the orbit of the binary,” the researchers explain.
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In a circumpolar arrangement, the cavity in the center of the system where the star lives must be small. “Therefore, the size of the binary cavity is an important diagnostic of the disk’s relative inclination to the binary’s orbit,” they wrote.
The disk in this polar orientation can extend up to 1.6 AU before touching the star’s cavity. It is a large dust cavity, and its size supports the existence of an exoplanet.
2023-11-07 02:01:00
#Time #Planet #Circumbinary #Disk #Stars
