Thursday, June 16, 2022

HD 53143

HD 53143 is 59.8 light years away and a billion years old, so an analogue to our solar-system at, what, 3567 Mya. Its terrestrial planets, if any, should be Archaean not Hadean.

The accretion discs should have hollowed out, in short. What we're seeing is that HD 53143 still has discs. And they insist on the plural; one disc is eccentric.

They suspect something twisting the planetesimals. If there was a brown-dwarf or even a Jovian, I'm surprised it hasn't been seen already - it may simply have been overlooked as candidate. The perturber perhaps passed close some many million years prior.

No comments:

Post a Comment