December 18, 2013

Baffling Triple-Star System Reveals an Exoplanet and a Spectacular Ring of

Comets

The nearby star Fomalhaut A hosts the most famous planetary system outside our own Solar
System, containing both an exoplanet and a spectacular ring of comets. An international team of

astronomers have announced a new discovery with the Herschel Space Observatory that has
made this system even more intriguing; the least massive star of the three in the Fomalhaut
system, Fomalhaut C, has now been found to host its own comet belt.
The new discovery might hold the key to some of the mysteries of the Fomalhaut system. The
lead author Grant Kennedy, an astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of
Cambridge, said, "It's very rare to find two comet belts in one system, and with the two stars 2.5
light years apart this is one of the most widely separated star systems we know of. It made us
wonder why both Fomalhaut A and C have comet belts, and whether the belts are related in some
way."
To get a feeling for how far 2.5 light years is, light from the Sun takes only 8 minutes to get to
the Earth, and 5.5 hours to get to Pluto, and the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is only
4 light years away.
This discovery may help solve the major mystery in the Fomalhaut system: the orbits of the
comet ring and planet around Fomalhaut A are elliptical (which simply means that the orbits
aren't circular). The elliptical orbits are thought to be the result of close encounters with
something else in the system, perhaps with another as yet undetected planet or perhaps with one
of the two other stars, B or C
Fomalhaut A is one of the brightest stars in the sky. Located 25 light years away in the
constellation of Piscis Austrinus, it shines with a blue-white colour and is prominent from the
southern hemisphere. From northern latitudes it appears low down in the south during autumn
evenings. In contrast, Fomalhaut C, also named LP 876-10, is a dim red dwarf star invisible
without a telescope, and was only found to be part of the Fomalhaut system in October this year.
Fomalhaut As prominence made it a key target for the Hubble Space Telescope, which
astronomers used to find the ring of comets, hints of and then a direct image of the planet,
Fomalhaut b, in 2008 (astronomers use uppercase letters for stars, and lowercase letters are used
for planets, so Fomalhaut b is a planet, and Fomalhaut B is the second star in the system).
The discovery of the comet belt around C is important because such encounters can not only
make the comet belts elliptical, they can also make them brighter by causing the comets to
collide more often, releasing massive amounts of dust and ice. Stars are rarely seen to have such
bright comet belts, so their detection around both A and C suggests that they may have had their
brightnesses enhanced by a previous close encounter between the two.
Paul Kalas of the University of California discovered the orbits are elliptical and is involved in
the new work. He said, "We thought that the Fomalhaut A system was disturbed by a planet on
the inside - but now it looks like a small star from the outside could also influence the system. A
good test of this hypothesis is to measure the red dwarf's exact orbit over the next few years."

The Hubble Space Telescope and ALMA reveal

Fomalhaut's off-kilter debris disk shown below, offset by 15 a.u. from the star, which is blocked
out in the middle. Click on the image to see the candidate planet Fomalhaut b.
The stellar interaction scenario isn't as unusual as it sounds. Comet ISON, which disintegrated
following a close encounter with our Sun at the end of November, may have been put on a Sungrazing orbit by a star that passed near to the Solar System in the past. Similarly, the proposed
encounters between the stars in the Fomalhaut system may have sent a few comets onto stargrazing orbits. You might imagine that if there were any habitable planets around Fomalhaut A
or C, their inhabitants might be luckier than us and see truly spectacular comet shows in their
night sky.
The Herschel Observatory, which observed the Universe in infrared light ran out of helium
coolant and stopped observing in April this year. This was seven months before Fomalhaut C
was identified as part of the triple star system, but fortunately the telescope had imaged it back in
2011, so the astronomers have plenty of data on it already.
Kennedy has actually known about the comet belt for several years; "Over the last few years we
used Herschel to look for comet belts around many stars within a few hundred light years of the
Sun. At that stage Fomalhaut C was just called LP 876-10 and we thought it was a lone red dwarf
with a comet belt. It was interesting because such discoveries are very rare, but didnt tell us why
it was there. After the discovery that this star was part of the Fomalhaut system, the existence of
its comet belt made us think harder about connections between the two stars, and it may be that it
helps solve the mystery of the elliptical comet belt around Fomalhaut A.
Kennedy and his team are now trying to check the stellar encounter idea with computer
simulations and more detailed observations of the Fomalhaut C belt. The apparent absence of a

belt around Fomalhaut B remains a mystery. But if the simulations are in line with what the
astronomers see, then this would be a smoking gun for a stellar interaction and proof that other
stars can affect how planetary systems form and evolve.
The image at the top of the page is Herschel's far-infrared observations of Fomalhaut and its
disk. Scientists have been trying to understand the makeup of the disk, and new observations by
the Herschel Space Observatory reveals the disk may come from cometary collisions. But in
order to create the amount of dust and debris seen around Fomalhaut, there would have to be
collisions destroying thousands of icy comets every day. The asymmetrical properties of the disk
are thought to be due to the gravity of a possible planet in orbit around the star.
I suspect there's a chance that the 440 Myr triple-star Fomalhaut system resulted from resonant
core-collapse perturbation of a single protostar that fragmented (bifurcated) repeatedly due to
excess-excess angular momentum.
And perhaps the 'A' and 'C' stars originally formed as close binaries that spiraled in and merged:
thus 5 former stars evolved into the present triple-star system, since close-binaryclose-binary
perturbation may be a particularly-efficient core-collapse mechanism.
Then their two former close-binary mergers would explain the comet disks (more likely
asteroids) around Fomalhaut A and C from planetesimals condensed by gravitational instability
(GI) out of merger debris at the former magnetic corotation radius of their former (recentlymerged) flare stars from merger debris. And centrifugal force of the wide-binary system around
its barycenter would tend to cause the planetesimals to slowly spiral out from their original semimajor axes, again by core collapse.
This system may have a number of commonalities with our own solar system, including:
1) Both may have been (Former) Multiple-Star Systems:
Formation of a multiple star system from a single protostar. Only a companion star to our Sun
could have formed the Oort cloud with its estimated mass of several Jupiters. This shoots down
the Nice Model which suggests that Jupiter populated the Oort cloud from inner solar system
planetesimals, since the Oort cloud has many times the angular momentum of Jupiter. However,
4.85 Myr Proxima (Centauri) has the ball park age to be our companion star
and _sufficient mass_ to have populated the Oort cloud
and the _right mass_ to have caused the late heavy bombardment (LHB) of the inner solar
system when the Sun-Proxima barycenter spiraled out across Neptune's orbit at 3,900 Ma with
(the starting condition of) Proxima's orbital distance from the Sun at about 75 AU at 4,567 Ma.
2) Both may Experience the Effects of Stellar Barycenter Centrifugal Force:
Then the 'recent' (22,000 years ago) loss of the Sun-Proxima barycenter (SPB) with the close
approach of Alpha Centauri and the apparent extremely-close encounter of Proxima with one of
the two binary components of Alpha Centauri gave Proxima its current escape-velocity kick.
Along with the 22,000 ya loss of our SPB comes the loss of its centrifugal force which may have
profound effects in the inner solar system including the planets:

2a) The loss of the SPB centrifugal force causes the planets to move closer to the Sun, "The
maximum extent of glaciation within this last glacial period was approximately 22,000 years
ago." (Last glacial period, Wikipedia)
2b) The loss of the SPB centrifugal force explains Venus' slight retrograde orbit if Venus had
previously been in synchronous rotation.
2c) We may be moving from an era dominated by comet and dwarf-planet impacts from the Oort
cloud to an era dominated by asteroid impacts from the inner solar system with the loss of the
SPB centrifugal force which may have held the asteroids against Jupiter's inner Lindblad
resonances prior to 22,000 ya.
Posted by: Snowball Solar System | December 18, 2013 at 04:14 PM
Very interesting discovery! but the interactions between stars seems like a "no-brainer". Such a
system might not be entirely rare either, just more so difficult to detect. Since there's trillions of
stars how can we say anything appears rare?
Posted by: Truth About Our Solar System | December 18, 2013 at 04:51 PM