Finding alien worlds in distant solar systems is a delicate task.
Astronomers’ instruments have come a long way from the first extrasolar planet Discoveries made in the 1990s, but the search remains difficult: finding tiny objects hundreds of light-years away, far outnumbered by their host stars. It should come as no surprise that exoplanet discoveries are sometimes just fluke.
This is the fate of the supposed planet HD 131399 Ab, which scientists once thought Three suns. When astronomers tried to look at the planet again, they found that it was actually something completely different and distant in the background, masked as an exoplanet. Now, the astronomers who originally discovered the planet are withholding their discovery.
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The star system HD 131399 is located 350 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus. The star system consists of three stars: a white A-type main star about twice the mass of our sun, around which astronomers believe HD 131399 Ab orbits, and two smaller companions.
scientists first announced The so-called discovery of HD 131399 Ab about six years ago. The newly discovered Jupiter-sized world received a lot of attention at the time, thanks in part to the novelty of a world with three suns. From the astronomers’ point of view, the discovery was interesting because it was photographed directly: instead of seeing the planet as a speck of darkness or the wobble of motion on its main star, the scientists observed it directly using their telescopes.
But as the years passed and astronomers tried to verify the system, they Found That something wasn’t right. In particular, the scientists looked at how different the objects are and how well they move against the stellar background seen at different points in Earth’s orbit. This analysis by independent astronomers found that the supposed planet and star system are not the same distance. Terra; Subsequent measurements taken by the original explorers of the planet confirmed this.
In other words, what scientists thought was a planet was actually something very fast moving in the background, several light-years from Earth, away from the HD 131399 system.
“It must be a very red star – maybe a red giant, maybe even a disk star.” Kevin Wagner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and one of the potential discoverers of HD 131399 Ab, told Space.com. He noted that the red color would make the star look deceptively like a planet.
Furthermore, this distant star appears to be moving at an abnormal speed and therefore appears to correspond to a much closer star system. This discrepancy suggests that some phenomena gave the star a boost – it may have been ejected from its host system or have a close encounter with another, scientists believe.
“Each of these events would be rare on their own,” Wagner told Space.com. “The combination of these two low-probability properties of the background object is what led us to misclassify it as a planet.”
Wagner said he’s not aware of any other cases where a red star or fast-moving object has been mistaken for a nearby planet – but as the HD 131399 Ab episode shows, the possibility certainly exists.
The research is described in paper Published Friday (April 15) in the journal Science.
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