Why Haven’t We Discovered Co-Orbital Exoplanets? Could Tides Offer a Possible Answer? PRESS RELEASE DATE May 26, 2022 CONTACT Rebecca McDonald Director of Communications SETI Institute rmcdonald@SETI.org So far, we haven’t discovered any exoplanets with...
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Why Haven’t We Discovered Co-Orbital Exoplanets? Could Tides Offer a Possible Answer? PRESS RELEASE DATE May 26, 2022 CONTACT Rebecca McDonald Director of Communications SETI Institute rmcdonald@SETI.org So far, we haven’t discovered any exoplanets with co-orbital objects. A new study suggests tides could be causing oscillations that remove co-orbitals before we can find them. May 26, 2022, Mountain View, CA – In our solar system, there are several thousand examples of co-orbital objects: bodies that share the same orbit around the Sun or a planet. The Trojan asteroids are such an example. We have not yet observed any similar co-orbitals in extrasolar systems, despite discovering more than 5,000 exoplanets. In a new study published in Icarus by Anthony Dobrovolskis, SETI Institute and Jack Lissauer, NASA Ames Research Center, the authors theorize that some Trojan exoplanets form, but the ones that are large and on short-period orbits (and thus relatively easy to detect) are typically f
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