Upsilon Andromedae system skew whiff!!!!

[3488]

Recent Hubble Space Telescope research & older ground bassed Doppler observations reveal the planetary system of Upsilon Andromedae has very different inclinations of up to 30 degrees of one another.

Article here.

Pretty interesting.

Andrew Brown.

 

[Gravity_Ray]

Its an interesting idea that a planet can be booted out of a system due to mass issues. I wonder how many rogue planets are flying around out in deep space going this way or that. Have any rogue planets been observed before, either directly or indirectly?

 

[robnissen]

Have any rogue planets been observed before, either directly or indirectly?

No. IIRC there may have been a free floating brown dwarf imaged, but no planets. I believe only two extra-solar planets have ever been imaged, and at least one of those may be a brown dwarf. Plus, both imaged planets are relatively nearby, and more importantly are orbiting a star which allows them to reflect light. A free floating planet would be almost completely dark, so we would have virtually no chance of imaging one any time in the foreseeable future. The only exception would be if some multi-Jupiter-mass planet just happened to wander by our neck of the woods and it had some internal heat source that would make it visible to an infrared telescope. But your odds would be much better on buying a lottery ticket than having that happen.

 

[neilsox]

If they are free floating = not orbiting a star, a free floating planet could enter our solar system, then leave a few years later = just passing though. They would be detectable while in our solar system, but none have been detected so far, so there are likely less than a million times a million of them in our galaxy. Neil

 

[DarkSands]

This makes me wonder if planet d was a rogue planet that was captured by the system rather than originally forming in it. Similar to the way a planet can capture a moon, perhaps a solar system can capture a planet. It would explain why it has different orbital characteristics from the other planets.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Capturing a planet (or even a moon) is exceeding difficult from a dynamical perspective. There's too much energy to dissapate unless everything is perfect.

 

[Gravity_Ray]

Well there are many strange solar systems out there. Our tidy and organized little solar system seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

 

[DarkSands]

Well there are many strange solar systems out there. Our tidy and organized little solar system seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

Thats the thing, I don't think there ever will be a norm, with billions of planets out there we are going to find every crazy combination you can think of, no two systems will be the same. Yeah I'm sure we'll find systems similar to ours but we'll also going to find ones completely different, and everything in-between. This is an exciting time and we'll only began to scratch the surface of all the worlds out there we're going to find, just wait until we start finding tens of thousands of planets.

 

[robnissen]

Well there are many strange solar systems out there. Our tidy and organized little solar system seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

Not necessarily. Our solar system may be the norm. Our observing capabilities are skewed towards detecting odd "solar systems" (actually the correct term would be "star systems"). The easist systems for us to detect contain "hot jupiters," by definition, those systems look odd compared to our system. If we could easily detect systems that look like ours, it is not unlikely that they could be the majority.

 

[nimbus]

Only after we've integrally scanned a majority of all star systems will we be able to say with enough certainty what the norms of planetary formation are.