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Moons that Escape their Planets Could Become "Ploonets":

Meet ploonets: planets of moonish origin.

In other star systems, some moons could escape their planets and start orbiting their stars instead, new simulations suggest. Scientists have dubbed such liberated worlds "ploonets," and say that current telescopes may be able to find the wayward objects.

Astronomers think that exomoons — moons orbiting planets that orbit stars other than the sun — should be common, but efforts to find them have turned up empty so far (SN Online: 4/30/19). Astrophysicist Mario Sucerquia of the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia and colleagues simulated what would happen to those moons if they orbited hot Jupiters, gas giants that lie scorchingly close to their stars (SN: 7/8/17, p. 4). Many astronomers think that hot Jupiters weren't born so close, but instead migrated toward their star from a more distant orbit.

As the gas giant migrates, the combined gravitational forces of the planet and the star would inject extra energy into the moon's orbit, pushing the moon farther and farther from its planet until eventually it escapes, the researchers report June 29 at arXiv.org.

[...] Some ploonets may be indistinguishable from ordinary planets. Others, whose orbits keep them close to their planet, could reveal their presence by changing the timing of when their neighbor planet crosses, or transits, in front of the star. The ploonet should stay close enough to the planet that its gravity can speed or slow the planet's transit times. Those deviations should be detectable by combining data from planet-hunting telescopes like NASA's TESS or the now-defunct Kepler, Sucerquia says.

Ploonethood may be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, though, making the worlds more difficult to spot. About half of the ploonets in the researchers' simulations crashed into either their planet or star within about half a million years. And half of the remaining survivors crashed within a million years.

What to call a celestial body that orbited a moon? — moonmoon? moo-oon?

M. Sucerquia et al. Ploonets: formation, evolution, and detectability of tidally detached exomoons. arXiv:1906.11400.

Original Submission

1. "martyb" - https://soylentnews.org/~martyb/
2. "Moons that Escape their Planets Could Become "Ploonets"" - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/moons-escape-their-planets-could-become-ploonets
3. "efforts to find them have turned up empty so far" - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/skepticism-whether-first-known-exomoon-exists-kepler
4. "hot Jupiters" - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scalding-hot-gas-giant-breaks-heat-records
5. "pushing the moon farther and farther from its planet until eventually it escapes" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11400.pdf
6. "Ploonets: formation, evolution, and detectability of tidally detached exomoons" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11400
7. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=34929

printed from SoylentNews, Moons that Escape their Planets Could Become "Ploonets" on 2024-04-19 05:00:14