New research recently published in the Astrophysical Journal has revealed how the relative position of planets may radically effect the climate of other planets in the vicinity. As telescopes become both larger and more sophisticated, this find can be used to figure out just where the optimal place to point them is.
The study was published by University of Washington astronomer, Rory Barnes, and his associates. Within is a detailed description of how the orbit of one planet can affect the orbit of a nearby planet, and as a result, change its climate.
According to the paper, all it takes is a little nudge here or there to alter the gravitational pull of a nearby planet. This can have anywhere from innocuous to devastating effects on the second planet.
The upshot is that the new research gives those at the helm of the telescopes an ability to focus on areas of the cosmos where these effects are less likely to occur.
The exact process is slow. Imagine a massive planet which orbits a star every three years and imagine a second smaller planet that orbits the same star every two years. Every so often the two planets will close in on each other as their orbits shoot them around the star. Over time, millions of years, the larger planet will change the orbit of the smaller planet, which will in turn change its climate.
It’s called “mean motion resonance”, and happens when the orbits of two planets are an integer ratio of each other, as in the above example.
Another issue, called “mutual inclination”, where the two planets’ orbits are not on the same plane. We have the good fortune that all the planets in our Solar System lie along the same plane, and are thus called coplanar. If two planets have vastly different orbits, as in the picture above, this can cause all kinds of problems.
“…what we found was that things go all haywire. Those little perturbations that keep happening at the same point cause one of the orbits to do some crazy things—even flip over entirely—and then kind of come back to where it was before. It was pretty unexpected for us.” said Barnes.
By determining the likelihood of the two above effects happening, there is greater justification to using telescopes to search for habitable planets. That, of course, would be a find of a lifetime.
