New research by a team led by an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick has a way of finally telling whether newly forming planets are migrating within the disc of dust and gas that typically surrounds stars or whether they are simply staying put in the same orbit around the star.
New research by a team led by an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick has a way of finally telling whether newly forming planets are migrating within the disc of dust and gas that typically surrounds stars or whether they are simply staying put in the same orbit around the star.
Finding real evidence that a planet is migrating (usually inwards) within such discs would help solve a number of problems that have emerged as astronomers are able to see more and more detail within protoplanetary discs. In particular it might provide a simple explanation for a range of strange patterns and disturbances that astronomers are beginning to identify within these discs.
Planet migration is a process that astronomers have known the theory about for 40 years but it’s only now that they have been able to find a way of observationally testing if it really occurs. This new research from a team led by the University of Warwick, along with Cambridge, provides two new observational signatures in young solar system’s dust rings that would be evidence of a migrating planet. That research is published, today on the 17th of October on arXiv AT https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.06573.pdf in a paper entitled “Is the ring inside or outside the planet?: The effect of planet migration on dust rings” which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Read more at University of Warwick
Image: This is Dr. Farzana Meru, Department of Physics, University of Warwick. (Credit: University of Warwick)
