Planets compositions10/11/2023 They were surprised to find that there was no correlation between the amount of heavy elements in these giant planets and the amount of these planet forming elements in their host stars. Teske, Thorngren and their colleagues-Jonathan Fortney of UC Santa Cruz, Natalie Hinkel of the Southwest Research Institute, and John Brewer of San Francisco State University-compared the bulk heavy element content of 24 cool, gas giant planets to the abundances of “planet forming elements” carbon, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, iron, and nickel in their 19 host stars (some stars host multiple planets). “Previous work looked at the relationship between the presence of planets and how much iron exists in the host star, but we wanted to expand that to include the heavy element content of the planets themselves, and to look at more than just iron,” explained co-author Daniel Thorngren, who completed much of the work as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and is now a Trottier Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal. At this point, the solid baby planetary interior is able to surround itself with helium and hydrogen gas, birthing a mature giant planet. This is thought to provide evidence for one of the primary competing theories for how planets form, which proposes that gas giant planets are built from the slow accretion of disk material until a core about 10 times Earth’s mass is formed. “Understanding the relationship between the chemical composition of a star and its planets could help shed light on the planetary formation process,” explained first author Johanna Teske of the Carnegie Institution for Science.įor example, previous research indicated that the occurrence of gas giant planets increases around stars with a higher concentration of heavy elements, those elements other than hydrogen and helium. Astronomers have long wondered how much a star’s makeup determines the raw material from which planets are constructed-a question that is easier to probe now that we know the galaxy is teeming with exoplanets. In their youths, stars are surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which planets are born. The new findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, have important implications for understanding the planetary formation process. A surprising analysis of the compositions of gas giant exoplanets and their host stars shows that there isn’t a strong correlation between their compositions when it comes to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
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