An international research team has discovered an extrasolar planet that orbits two stars, just like Tatooine from the Star Wars saga. The celestial body, called Toi-1338c or BEBOP-1c, has a mass 65 times that of Earth.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith
Scientists have discovered a planet which orbits two starsexactly like the famous one Tatooine of the sci-fi saga of Star Wars. Unlike the barren celestial body on which he grew up Luke Skywalkerhowever, it is a gas giant tens of times more massive than Earth, thus totally inhospitable to life. But the fact remains that it is a very suggestive and interesting discovery, even more so since it is the second planet identified in the same system. The first, known as Toi-1338bwas discovered in 2020 thanks to the “planet hunter” Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) from NASA and described in the journal Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. The second, called You-1338chas only recently been identified due to the covid pandemicwhich in 2020 prevented scientists from fully studying the system with two powerful telescopes installed in the Atacama desert in Chile (the observatories were closed for six months).
To discover the second planet of the Toi-1338 system, also known as BEBOP-1 as studied through the project Binaries Escort By Orbiting Planets, was a large international research team led by scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham (UK), collaborating closely with colleagues from the Department of Astronomy at San Diego State University, ‘Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, the Department of Astronomy of Ohio State University and many other institutions. The researchers, coordinated by Dr. Matthew Standing, now in force at the Open University after completing his doctorate at the British university, have identified the planet You-1338c (o BEBOP-1c) through the radial velocity techniqueunlike the transit method used more commonly.
They have currently been discovered over 5,000 exoplanets and most of them have been identified thanks to the transit method, based on the fluctuations in the illumination of the stars caused by the passage of the hosted planets (which in practice produce tiny eclipses). Yet the first ever exoplanet, identified in the 1995, was detected through the radial velocity, which in very simple terms analyzes the gravitational influence of the planets on the parent star (or parent stars, as in this case). The discovery of BEBOP-1c it was practically random. Doctor Standing and his colleagues were in fact trying to determine the mass of Toi-1338b (the planet discovered in 2020) through powerful telescopes placed in the Chilean Atacama desert; they failed in the enterprise, but the second planet of the system emerged from the data collected.
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From calculations it was determined that Toi-1338c has mass 65 times higher than that of the Earthequal to about 5 times less than that of Jupiter, as explained by Dr. Standing in a press release. The second planet circumbinaryas planets orbiting two stars are called, employs 215 days to complete one orbit around the two stars; this means that one year on this celestial body lasts like 7 months on Earth. To date, only 12 systems with planets orbiting two stars are known, and only two of them are multi-planetary systems, i.e. with more than one planet. One of the two is the one just discovered. The details of the research “Radial-velocity discovery of a second planet in the TOI-1338/BEBOP-1 circumbinary system” have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Astronomy.