SETI and NASA Breakthrough: 27 Candidate Planets Found in Systems Where They Were Invisible
World
Worlds with double sunsets, legendary thanks to the Star Wars franchise, have proven to be far more common than previously thought. A team of astronomers, led by the University of New South Wales and the SETI Institute, has discovered 27 new "candidate planets" in binary star systems. This discovery was made possible by an innovative method of analyzing gravitational distortions, allowing planets to be found even where they remain invisible to traditional detection techniques.
The search for exoplanets traditionally relies on the "transit method"—recording the moment a planet passes in front of a star, slightly dimming its light. However, this method is only effective if the orbit is perfectly aligned relative to Earth. New research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society proposes a fundamentally different approach: tracking the apsidal motion of orbits. Scientists analyzed data from NASA's TESS space telescope, focusing on tiny time shifts in the moments of mutual eclipses between two stars.
The essence of the method lies in the fact that an invisible planet, through its gravitational pull, causes microscopic changes in the stars' movement. These "gravitational fingerprints" manifest as a gradual rotation of the binary system's orbital path. After studying 1,590 eclipsing binary systems, the astronomers identified 71 cases of orbital anomalies. In 27 of these, the most likely explanation was the presence of a planetary-mass object. Prior to this discovery, only 18 confirmed "circumbinary" planets were known to science, making the current result a true breakthrough.
The particular value of this method lies in the ability to investigate hot and massive stars, where searching for planets by conventional means is extremely difficult. Currently, only a tiny fraction of the two million known binary systems has been analyzed. Expanding the search to the entire Gaia catalog dataset, combined with long-term TESS observations, promises the discovery of hundreds of new worlds. This data will allow scientists to refine theories of planet formation and understand how celestial bodies survive the complex gravitational environments of systems with two suns.
The essence of the method lies in the fact that an invisible planet, through its gravitational pull, causes microscopic changes in the stars' movement. These "gravitational fingerprints" manifest as a gradual rotation of the binary system's orbital path. After studying 1,590 eclipsing binary systems, the astronomers identified 71 cases of orbital anomalies. In 27 of these, the most likely explanation was the presence of a planetary-mass object. Prior to this discovery, only 18 confirmed "circumbinary" planets were known to science, making the current result a true breakthrough.
The particular value of this method lies in the ability to investigate hot and massive stars, where searching for planets by conventional means is extremely difficult. Currently, only a tiny fraction of the two million known binary systems has been analyzed. Expanding the search to the entire Gaia catalog dataset, combined with long-term TESS observations, promises the discovery of hundreds of new worlds. This data will allow scientists to refine theories of planet formation and understand how celestial bodies survive the complex gravitational environments of systems with two suns.
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