It is about 200 light years from Earth

The "Cubes" telescope discovers a "cosmic dance" of 5 planets

These planets follow the movement of the "resonance chain" discovered by the astronomer Laplace at the end of the 18th century.

The European Space Telescope "Cubes" revealed that five of the distant outer planets from the solar system move in a regular and coordinated manner, as if performing a dance, a phenomenon that has never been observed among stars whose diversity calls for a review of theories related to their formation, according to a recent study.

These planets, which are called exogenous, due to their presence outside the solar system, revolve on the same plane around their star, TOI-178, with a very precise time uniform, about 200 light years away from Earth.

These planets follow the movement of the "resonance chain", which was discovered by the astronomer Laplace at the end of the 18th century with three of Jupiter's moons.

And Laplace found that the time required for one cycle of Ganymede, which is the farthest, that the planet closest to Europa makes two rotations, while Io, which is closer to Jupiter, runs out four.

The same mechanical movement applies to the TOI-178.

The rotation of the first planet in the chain around the star takes about three days, while the following planets, each of which are farther from the previous one, need six days, then 10, 15, and finally 20, and the alignment of some of them is consistent regularly.

An animated film expresses the phenomenon, in which music accompanies the movement of these planets.

A sixth exoplanet, which is closest to the star, rotates at a very high speed, inconsistent with the following planets.

"We only know five other systems that work according to this mechanism," in which a group of exoplanets co-ordinate in an orbital harmony around their star, said lead author of the study published this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, an astronomer at the University of Geneva Observatory, Adrian Liliu. .

'Frozen system'

As for the astrophysicist at the University of Bern, Jannick Alliber, who participated in the preparation of the study, he emphasized that the importance of the movement of these planets lies in the fact that they are still probably unchanged since they were formed, as if they were "a system frozen since the end of their formation phase, which lasts millions of years." Nothing has disturbed this "somewhat fragile" balance during the more than two billion years that followed this stage until today.

At this point things get complicated.

Usually, the density of the planets decreases as the distance from the star is, but the density of the third planet in the chain in particular is much higher than the density of the second.

"There is a lot of diversity, which is surprising," Lillio noted.

Planets exist outside the solar system.

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