![]() The scenario to explain HD106906 b’s bizarre orbit is similar in some ways to what may have caused the hypothetical Planet Nine to end up in the outer reaches of our own Solar System, beyond the Kuiper Belt. This raises all sorts of questions about how HD 106906 b ended up so far out on such an inclined orbit.” “It would be bizarre if, say, Jupiter just happened to be inclined 30 degrees relative to the plane that every other planet orbits in. “To highlight why this is weird, we can just look at our own Solar System and see that all of the planets lie roughly in the same plane,” explained Nguyen. This study was led by Meiji Nguyen of the University of California, Berkeley. The debris disc itself is very extraordinary, perhaps due to the gravitational tug of the rogue planet. The Hubble team behind this new result was surprised to find that the remote world has an extreme orbit that is very inclined, elongated and external to a dusty debris disc that surrounds the exoplanet’s twin host stars. ![]() The planet is creeping very slowly along its orbit, given the weak gravitational pull of its very distant parent stars. ![]() This wide separation made it enormously challenging to determine the 15 000-year-long orbit in such a short time span of Hubble observations. The exoplanet resides extremely far from its host pair of bright, young stars - more than 730 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This required something only the Hubble Space Telescope could do: collect very accurate measurements of the vagabond’s motion over 14 years with extraordinary precision. However, astronomers did not then know anything about the planet’s orbit. The exoplanet HD106906 b was discovered in 2013 with the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc.
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