April 28, 2005

How planet orbits became so eccentric

By Megan Fellman

Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, beginning with the discovery 10 years ago of the first planet outside our solar system, evidence suggests that, as far as planetary systems go, the solar system might be special indeed.

Instead of the nice circular orbits our nine planets enjoy, most of the more than 160 extrasolar planets detected in the last decade have eccentric orbits: so elongated that many come in very close to the central star and then go out much further away. In a paper published April 14 by the journal Nature, astrophysicists at Northwestern are the first to report direct observational evidence explaining the violent origins of this surprising planetary behavior.

“Our results show that a simple mechanism, often called ‘planet-planet scattering,’ a sort of slingshot effect due to the sudden gravitational pull between two planets when they come very near each other, must be responsible for the highly eccentric orbits observed in the Upsilon Andromedae system,” said Frederic A. Rasio, associate professor of physics and astronomy. “We believe planet-planet scattering occurred frequently in extrasolar planetary systems, not just this one, resulting from strong instabilities. So while planetary systems around other stars may be common, the kinds of systems that could support life, which, like our solar system, presumably must remain stable over very long time scales, may not be so common.”

Verene Lystad, an undergraduate student majoring in physics at Northwestern, and Eric B. Ford, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a former student of Rasio’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are members of Rasio’s research team and authors on the Nature paper.

The system they focused on, three huge Jupiter-like planets orbiting the central star Upsilon Andromedae, was the first extrasolar multi-planet system ever discovered by Doppler spectroscopy. (In this technique, planets are detected and studied indirectly by measuring the reflex motion they impose on their parent stars.) The inner planet, a “hot Jupiter” so close to the star that its orbit is only a few days, was discovered in 1996, and the two outer planets, with elongated orbits that perturb each other strongly, were discovered in 1999. As a result, the system now has been well studied for many years and offered the best and most accurate data for the research team’s calculations.

“In this system the two outer planets are in a very peculiar orbital configuration, which kept puzzling us for a long time,” said Rasio.

To understand this better, Rasio and his collaborators developed a precise computer model of the orbits of the planets as they are today and then evolved them back tens of thousands of years. Their analysis showed that the system evolved over time exactly as would be expected if the initially stable system was suddenly perturbed, with the sudden disturbance affecting the outermost planet only.