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When this star blows, its planets will be turned into enormous pinballs - Livescience.com

When this star blows, its planets will be turned into enormous pinballs - Livescience.com

When this star blows, its planets will be turned into enormous pinballs - Livescience.com
Jun 17, 2021 1 min, 54 secs

Four planets in a nearby solar system could pinball off each other and careen off into outer space when the star they orbit dies, astronomers predict. .

These planets, each of which weighs more than five times the mass of Jupiter, orbit a star that is 30 million to 40 million years old.

Right now, the closely-spaced planets are locked in a perfect rhythm, with each planet orbiting at twice the speed of the next outermost one — so that for every orbit the furthest planet completes, the next closest in will complete two, the one after that four, while the closest to the star completes eight. .

But once their star becomes a red giant — ballooning to hundreds of times its original size — the hefty orbs will get flung out of the star's gravitational grip, according to a new study which modeled changes to the fine balance of the system's gravitational forces.

Add in a fourth and then a fifth, as in the HR8799 star system, and the interactions are even more complex.To better understand how this game of planetary pinball might play out, the team created a computer model that enabled them to view the numerous, vastly different ways the planets could scatter chaotically after the researchers made only slight adjustments to the their starting positions. .

The team's model, alongside an estimate of the remaining time the star will spend in its current phase, predicts that the planets are likely to remain locked in their cosmic balancing act for the next 3 billion years — regardless of any disruptive effects from nearby star flybys or tidal forces caused by the movement of galaxies.

Over time, as the star runs out of heavier elements to fuse, it will shed its outer layers, leaving behind its bright white core — a white dwarf.

This red giant stage spells doom for HR 8799's pirouetting planets, which will be scattered in all directions, dislodging material from nearby debris disks — disks of dust and rock that orbit stars — into the star's atmosphere

"These planets move around the white dwarf at different locations and can easily kick whatever debris is still there into the white dwarf, polluting it," Veras said

"The HR 8799 planetary system represents a foretaste of the polluted white dwarf systems that we see today

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