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Top Comments: Triple Star Systems with Planets [1]
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Date: 2023-05-28
Most three-star systems consist of two stars orbiting at relatively close range, with the third orbiting the double system at a significantly greater distance. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (2022)
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A research article has recently been published cataloging all triple-star systems where planets have been detected. Such systems are interesting for a variety of reasons. In particular, it’s never been proved that systems consisting of more than two stars are stable over billions of years. Further, the orbits of planets in such a system may be quite different from the orbits of planets in single-star systems like our own. As long as a planet in a single-star system is sufficiently far away from other planets, its orbit around the star is a nice, stable ellipse. Over billions of years, this orbit may change very slightly depending on very slow energy loss or perturbations from gravitational perturbation from other planets, but you’d hardly be able to tell the difference. In a system with multiple stars, a planet now is subject to much greater perturbation due to the nearby presence of the multiple stars. It is likely that the orbits of planets in such systems change significantly over the billions-of-years lifetimes of these systems, and it’s not out of the question that a planet could be thrown out of the system through a slingshot-like process.
Most identified exoplanets (i. e. planets orbiting star systems other than the Sun) orbit only one star, like our own solar system. Only 0.5 % of discovered exoplanets are found in triple-star systems, which totals about 30 planets. An overwhelming majority of these are gas giants (like Jupiter in the Solar System), but a few Earth-sized planets in triple-star systems have been identified.
Most triple-star systems are in the form of two stars orbiting at a relatively close distance, while the third star orbits around that pair at a significantly longer distance. A big challenge is to try to model how a triple-star system with planets evolves from clouds of dust and gas to the dynamically complex three stars with (potentially) multiple planets orbiting. This is a very hard problem.
One of my favorite science fiction stories is “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov, which takes place on a planet in a system of six stars. I have a feeling the dynamical stability of such a system never crossed Asimov’s mind (I think the chances of stability over billions of years for six such massive bodies are pretty low, myself), but it’s a good story anyway.
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