Astronomers say it's the first piece of evidence to suggest that a pair of planets can share the same orbit.
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Trojans exist within two extended regions in a planet’s orbit called the Lagrangian zones, where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. After observing those two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, the team of astronomers behind the new study det ected a faint signal from one of them. That signal indicated that a cloud of debris with a mass roughly two times that of our Moon is wedged in that gravitational sweet spot.The above image was taken by ALMA and shows the star system, with the planet PDS 70b highlighted with a solid yellow circle and its tag-along cloud of debris highlighted by a yellow dotted line. The cloud of debris could either be the building blocks of a new planet in the process of formation or an existing Trojan world.
“Who could imagine two worlds that share the duration of the year and the habitability conditions? Our work is the first evidence that this kind of world could exist,” Olga Balsalobre-Ruza, a student at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “We can imagine that a planet can share its orbit with thousands of asteroids as in the case of Jupiter, but it is mind blowing to me that planets could share the same orbit.
The team behind the study are waiting for an observational slot with ALMA in 2026, allowing for follow-up observations of the star system to confirm whether or not PDS 70b and its sibling cloud of debris move in-sync together along their orbit to see how tight those two really are.
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