Saturday, April 12, 2025

Weighing Proxima b

Proxima Centauri b is 1.07/sini Earth mass, 0.04856 AU. i, inclination, is not edge-on 90°; its planets do not transit. But we may have ways around that.

The star is presently rotating 107.6° inclination to us, not too badly off 90°. This will change as our systems approach and Prox orbits its binary.

Now, that i is not the b planet's inclination... but in most systems, like ours, the ecliptic isn't far off. Astronomers suspect an inner planet "d". If so, that b (and maybe outer c) didn't suffer a lot of perturbation for instance when getting captured by the big binary. That d could still be Mercurial, with a wonky orbit. But it further could soak up the hardest impacts, leaving b relatively un-pushed. Also: the worst-case outer planet is c which itself probably does not exist. To sum: with d and no c, I don't expect wild tilts of Kozai von Zeipel on b neither. Planetary-orbit inclination should be about inline with the star's rotation.

In the future, I expect planetary transit will happen. As to when: we would need a solution for the Prox orbit, over that 550ky year around the Alpha Centauri barycentre. MS Copilot isn't giving me a good ellipse.

Failing that, I find reasonable for b sini=0.9551. 1.12 Earth mass.

No comments:

Post a Comment