Download Press Release UTA: A Planet Heats its Star

UTA Press Release – January 9, 2004
A Planet Heats its Star: a Four-Year-Old
Prediction Confirmed
Four years ago, University of Texas at Arlington Assistant Professor
of Physics Manfred Cuntz predicted that there are planets in close
enough proximity to their host stars to heat them (rather than the
star heating the planet as is the case with the sun and the earth).
But this phenomenon had not yet been proven or seen.
Wednesday, a team of scientists presented a paper at the winter
meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta that they
have made the first ever observation of a planet heating its
star. This discovery also implies the
first evidence of magnetic fields on a planet outside of our solar
system.
Cuntz made his prediction as part of collaborative
research with UTA Professor of Physics Zdzislaw Musielak and
Steven Saar of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
University of British Columbia Ph.D. candidate Evgenya Shkolnik
Wednesday cited Cuntz for his prediction which he made while
conducting research at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
HD179949, for which this phenomenon has been observed, is 90 light
years away in the direction of the southern constellation of Sagittarius
(the Archer) but it is too faint to be seen without a telescope. It was first
reported to have a close-in planet by Tinney, Butler, Marcy and others in
the first results of the Anglo-Australian planet search in 2000. The
planet is at least 270 times more massive than the Earth, almost as big as
Jupiter, and orbits the star every 3.093 days at 350,000 mph. Such
tightly orbiting “roasters” or “hot jupiters” make up 20% of all known
extrasolar planets.
Observations of this type are relevant to understand the structure
and evolution of planets outside the solar system.
They also allow us to compare planets outside the solar system with
the two giant planets in our own solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.
Jupiter is known to have a magnetic field almost 20,000 times larger
than that of Earth which is generated by a unique dynamo effect
inside the planet. It is important to understand whether similar
processes also operate in planets around other stars.
The observations were made by
Shkolnik, Dr. Gordon Walker, also of
the University of British Columbia,
and Dr. David Bohlender of the
National Research Council of Canada
/ Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics,
Victoria, BC. They used the 3.6-meter
(142-in) Canada-France-Hawaii
Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii (a
14,000-ft. dormant volcano) using its
high-resolution spectrograph called Gecko.
Cuntz can be reached at 817 272 2467.