Huge discovery: Rare planetary system with six worlds revealed

The exoplanets, all larger than Earth but smaller than ice giant Neptune, dance around the bright star in a perfectly synchronized cosmic waltz of tightly connected orbits.

In this case, this means that the planet closest to the star, called b, makes three orbits around the star in the time it takes the next planet, c, to make two orbits.

For every time c makes three tracks, d makes two tracks. The pattern continues to the two outer planets in the system, f and g, where the ratio is 4:3.

So the inner one makes four rounds every time the outer one makes three.

The closely linked cosmic dance is known as orbital resonance, a phenomenon that may unfold at the beginning of most planetary systems.

However, the perfect orbit can easily be disturbed by, for example, passing stars or colliding planets.

System is ‘frozen in time’

However, in the newly discovered planetary system, it appears that the resonance persists more than a billion years after the system itself was formed. As if frozen in time.

And it is a rare sight, because probably only 1 percent of all planetary systems rotate in resonance, which is why scientists call it a ‘perfect solar system’.

Even rarer, astronomers have found five pairs of exoplanets orbiting each other in synchrony, just as they did when the system formed billions of years ago.

According to the researchers, this shows that “the evolution of the system has been very gentle and calm,” as lead author Rafael Luque explains to Astronomy.

Watch the video: This is how the planets move

That’s why astronomers believe the pristine planet family is ideal for studying how planetary systems like ours form.

Can be followed from Earth

The team behind the study used data from 12 telescopes to identify the six planets in our cosmic region.

One of these was the American space telescope TESS, which was sent into space in 2018 and already in 2020 observed how two of the planets passed in front of the host star HD110067.

Later, the astronomers received help from the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS space telescope.

The star itself is the brightest one found with more than four planets around it, so telescopes on Earth will be keeping a close eye on it.

The researchers hope that in the future they can obtain even more data about the size, atmosphere and perhaps even the core of the planets.

The research appeared in the scientific magazine Nature.