Twisted magnetic fields can reveal how protobinary systems, Tatooine planets form

Twisted magnetic fields around binary systems can reveal how the stellar system came together.

Circumbinary planets - planets that orbit around two stars, like the fictional Star Wars planet Tatooine and its two suns - exist in the Universe, and are sometimes referred to as Tatooine planets. Systems in which two stars rotate around each other, called binary star systems, are incredibly common, comprising over half the stars in the Milky Way. But how does a binary system like this happen?

Researchers using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, (SOFIA) observed, along with several other observations, a 45-degree twist in the magnetic field of protobinary system L483.

SOFIA saw a twisted magnetic field around a protobinary star system--a very young binary star system that is still growing. This provides a hint about how the protobinary system came to be. The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters.

As stars begin to form, they obtain most of their material from a disk of dust and gas surrounding them. A larger envelope of matter surrounds and feeds the disk. From here, binaries can emerge in one of two ways - far apart, where they grow in the envelope, or much closer to one another, where they form in the disk.

There's a caveat, though. Binaries that form in the envelope can move closer to each other over time, so even if they look near to one another now, they were not necessarily always that way.

"We think these protostars formed far away, migrated, and twisted up their field in the process of coming toward each other," said Erin Cox, a postdoctoral associate at Northwestern University who led the study.

That's where magnetic fields come in.

In the recent study, SOFIA observations - supported by data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the Pico dos Dias Observatory, and archival data from the Herschel Space Observatory - found the magnetic field in the star-forming cloud Lynds 483 (L483) is oriented east-to-west in its outer regions, but twists 45 degrees counter-clockwise toward its center. ALMA confirmed that L483 contains two protostars and Herschel provided information about some of the region's physical properties, while SOFIA and Pico dos Dias traced the magnetic field shape.

Because stars and their planets form around the same time, figuring out how the protobinary came together tells astronomers about the types of planets it can harbor.

"If we understand how the protobinary stars formed, we will get a better understanding of how much stuff is in the disk, which is the material that provides the planets with their masses," Cox said. "We want to understand what our starting mass budget is for these planets."

For example, the protobinaries' inward migration can enhance the motion of the gas and dust around them, ejecting them out of the system. If too much material gets blown out, only Earth-like rocky planets can potentially form, rather than gas giants, like Jupiter.

Being able to see these magnetic fields helps decipher the formation of binary systems and, in turn, their associated Tatooine planets.

Research Report:Regional Map of Molecular Water at High Southern Latitudes on the Moon Using 6 um Data From the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy

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