Is the three-star system Alpha Centauri hosting a Super Jupiter?

New research suggests that Alpha Centauri could host a Super Jupiter in a stable orbit. The research into it has been done by Tinglong Feng, an undergraduate at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. Feng took up the three-body problem which has been a cosmic issue. The problem causes gravitational interactions between the bodies causing instability, and making the movements of the three bodies extremely difficult to predict. 

When a planet orbits two stars, it creates a three-body problem, but one that can also be called a “restricted three-body problem". Some potential stable orbits can exist in such a scenario for a planet.

Feng studied Centauri AB, the nearest binary neighbour to our world and tried to understand whether a super Jupiter can exist in the system and the orbit it might have. 

“The three-body problem, which seeks stable orbit configurations among gravitating bodies, is a longstanding challenge in celestial mechanics,” Feng writes. 

“As the closest triple stellar system to Earth, Alpha Centauri system has attracted diverse studies in astronomy, including exoplanet stability,” Feng writes. 

Even though the entire Alpha Centauri system is a triple star system, the third star is far enough from Centauri AB to let them qualify as a binary system, Feng writes.

Feng compared the Centauri AB system with a similar star system named GJ65AB (Gliese 65) only about 8.8 light-years away from Earth. This star system is binary and hosts an exoplanet of the mass of Neptune. Feng says that despite Gliese 65 being a pair of M-dwarfs, the system “shares similar mass ratios and orbital eccentricities". He ran simulations of the Centauri AB system to get a clear picture of whether the system can host an exoplanet.

“The similarities between GJ65AB and Alpha Centauri AB, together with the newly detected stable super Neptune in the GJ65 system, suggest the stability of the corresponding potential super Jupiter in Alpha Centauri AB,” Feng writes. 

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He theorises that if Gliese 65 and the Alpha Centauri AB systems are similar, and if GJ65 can host a planet in a stable orbit, can the same be true for Centauri AB?

He then went on to find stable orbits for a planet orbiting Centauri AB. Feng identified Centauri A as the primary star and placed a planet with the mass of 350 Earths at a distance of 23.336 AU, keeping others parameters similar to GJ65. “We figured out the stable zone spanning from 0.1 to ~ 2.2 au, and ranges from 0 to 0.5,” Feng writes.

“From this hypothesis, together with the newly detected Neptune-mass planet in the GJ65 system, which is similar to Alpha Centauri AB, we assume the existence of a potential Jupiter-mass planet with corresponding orbital parameters in Alpha Centauri AB should also be possible,” Feng writes.

So far, no planets have been found around Centauri AB, but Proxima Centauri, which lies near it, has two confirmed exoplanets. Notably, scientists have noticed signs of a planet being in Alpha Centauri A.