Hot Jupiter provides new insights

(CONNECT) Researchers from the universities of Zurich, Bern and Geneva, together with international researchers, have discovered new constellations in the WASP-132 planetary system as part of the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS, according to a press release.

The researchers discovered that a so-called hot Jupiter - a planet with a mass similar to that of Jupiter in our solar system - orbits the system's central star in seven days and three hours. A super-Earth, a rocky planet with six times the mass of Earth, has an orbit of just 24 hours and 17 minutes. The planetary system also has a massive giant planet that takes five years to orbit the gas star. Until now, researchers had assumed that hot Jupiters exist in isolation in their planetary system. "The discovery of a hot Jupiter next to an inner super-Earth and a distant giant challenges our understanding of the formation and evolution of these systems," François Bouchy, from the Département d'Astronomie at the Faculty of Science of the University of Geneva, is quoted as saying in the press release. According to Solène Ulmer-Moll, former postdoc at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, it was "the first time we have observed such a configuration". Since hot Jupiters do not exist exclusively in isolation in planetary systems, their migration process must be different than previously assumed, according to the researchers.

The exploration of WASP-132 was initiated in 2006 as part of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) program, and in 2014 the CORALIE spectrograph, which is installed on the Swiss Euler telescope and controlled by the University of Geneva, began observing hot Jupiter. In the years that followed, the movements of the super-Earth and the giant planet were tracked and recorded. According to Ravit Helled, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Zurich and co-author of the study, these investigations into the combinations of the three observed planets provide "important clues to theories of planet formation and, in particular, their migration processes." ce/ww