At first astronomers thought they might have detected
a planet around a single star somewhere in our galaxy.
«Finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding
planets around single stars,» said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the paper's coauthors, in a press release announcing the discovery.
Not exact matches
The lead author of the new study, Guillem Anglada [1], from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC), Granada, Spain, explains the significance of this find: «The dust
around Proxima is important because, following the discovery of the terrestrial
planet Proxima b, it's the first indication of the presence of an elaborate planetary system, and not just a
single planet,
around the
star closest to our Sun.»
«The number of potentially habitable
planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them
around each low - mass
star — instead of looking at ten
stars to look for a
single potentially habitable
planet, we now know we can look at just one
star and find several of them,» adds co-author Rory Barnes (University of Washington, USA).
During the relatively brief, combined giant phases of the two
stars at present, however, a
planet could orbit the Aab pair far enough out for the two
stars to act as a
single gravitational source and near enough for it to receive enough energy to sustain life, possibly
around 12.5 AUs out from the binary.
Since a
star and its
planets were never part of a
single swirling gas and dust cloud spinning
around the same axis, there is no reason for hot Jupiters to have their spin axes aligned with the
star's spin axis, or for all their orbits to be prograde.
Only 5 percent of the universe is believed to be made of normal matter, and that makes up every
single galaxy,
planet and
star we see
around us.
On March 29, 2007, astronomers using NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope announced their finding that planetary systems — dusty disks of asteroids, comets, and possibly
planets — may be at least as abundant in binary
star systems as they are
around single stars, like Sol.