Binary Star 980 Light Years Away Discovered with Three Exoplanet Systems in Early Stage

Experts recently captured an image of three whole planetary systems out in deep space. Each of the systems consists of a cluster of exoplanets in their early evolutionary stage around a single binary star.

Binary System SVS 13

(Photo: ESO/L. Calçada)
This artist’s impression shows the dust and gas around the double star system GG Tauri-A. Researchers using ALMA have detected gas in the region between two discs in this binary system. This may allow planets to form in the gravitationally perturbed environment of the binary. Half of Sun-like stars are born in binary systems, meaning that these findings will have major consequences for the hunt for exoplanets.

The binary system, dubbed as the SVS 13, is located in a region 980 lightyears away from our planet. The new image of the system shows how its exoplanet members are developing amidst the hovering dust clouds.

University of Manchester's ALMA Regional Center and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) expert Ana Karla Diaz-Rodriguez, who also authored the study, explained that the findings they gathered presents how each of the stellar bodies are surrounded by a large disk of dust and gas materials.

Both of the disks, in which the parent stars were enveloped, are hidden inside a larger disk forming throughout all the boundaries of the exoplanet systems, she continued.

The other disk is attached with spiral dust that resulted from its feeding activities. The spiral structure is connected to each of the smaller disks, where the developing exoplanets will eventually form in the future.

Stars originate from the molecular gas and dust clouds that are hovering naturally across the universe. These components could construct dense knots that, when processed in the right conditions, could collapse in their own gravity.

The dense knots will then begin spinning after it gets ahold of its gravitational pull, allowing the mixture of materials to flatten like a disk that will eventually become a star.

In the moment that a stellar body concludes its developing stage, the remaining materials not submerged into them become the protoplanetary disk.

The protoplanetary disk is where the excess products of the star birth make other members of the system such as the asteroids, moons, and planets.

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Two Parent Stars, Three Planetary Systems

All of the known systems across the vast space have gone through this same process. Like our very own solar system, most of the planetary bodies such as exoplanets outside our neighborhood form around a single sun of their own.

In cases such as a binary star, experts first theorized that the formation of its members is quite hostile compared to a single-star system. This is due to the detrimental factors that a binary system possesses, such as complicated gravitational imbalance.

SVS 13 is closer to the solar system, unlike many other binary systems. It formed in a region called the Perseus molecular cloud, in which the dust is known to frequently create stars. The location of this binary stem has a distance that measures about 90 astronomical units away from the sun, which is a bit farther than Pluto's 40 astronomical units from the burning orb.

Combining the stellar bodies of the SVS 13 would result in a mass equivalent of our sun, Science Alert reports.

The new study was made possible through the three-decade data collected by the Very Large Array at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, alongside the information gathered through the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

The smaller disks consist of a radius measuring nine and 12 astronomical units, respectively, while each gas radius covers 30 astronomical units. The larger disk scratches to a radius of 500 astronomical units.

The current age might not see how the SVS 13 will develop its exoplanets, but the materials present in the binary system today could help us have a glimpse of its future.

The study's pre-print was published in the journal arXiv, titled "The Physical Properties of the SVS 13 Protobinary System: Two Circumstellar Disks and a Spiraling Circumbinary Disk in the Making."