{"id":75987,"date":"2025-10-08T10:50:52","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T17:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=75987"},"modified":"2025-10-08T14:06:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T21:06:13","slug":"eccentric-warm-jupiters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/eccentric-warm-jupiters\/","title":{"rendered":"Could these wacky warm Jupiters help astronomers solve the planet formation puzzle?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you do when you have an unanticipated astronomical phenomenon, a dataset made of planets thousands of light-years away and theoretical models that fail to explain what exactly you’re looking at?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you’re <\/span>Diego Mu\u00f1oz<\/span><\/b>, an assistant professor in NAU\u2019s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the answer is simple: You get to work on new models.<\/span><\/p>\n

With support from the National Science Foundation and his co-primary investigators at Indiana University Bloomington, Mu\u00f1oz will head a three-year investigation into the formation of eccentric warm Jupiters\u2014gas giant planets that exist outside our solar system and have peculiar and sometimes unprecedented oval-shaped orbits.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the end of the study in 2028, Mu\u00f1oz hopes to theoretically understand not only how these planetary outliers formed, but also if and how these astrophysical processes could have influenced the creation of our solar system.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe variability of extrasolar planets is just enormous,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said. \u201cExtrasolar systems can look like our solar system, but in some cases, they look entirely different and exotic. We\u2019re very interested in seeing how the solar system forms in context by understanding systems that look like ours and ones that look completely different. We can get a sense of what the extremes are, how average our planet formation history is and how average our solar system is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the most interesting extreme systems, Mu\u00f1oz said, are those that house eccentric warm Jupiters.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scientists previously believed warm Jupiters could form like their well-studied hot Jupiter cousins, which have similar masses and sizes but are closer to their host stars. However, as telescopes became more advanced and data grew more precise, astronomers discovered warm Jupiters may have complex origins of their own.<\/span><\/p>\n

While hot Jupiters can orbit their stars in almost any orientation, warm Jupiters are almost universally aligned with their hosts\u2019 equators. Data also suggest that the more eccentric, or oval-shaped, a warm Jupiter\u2019s orbit, the more aligned it is with its star, a phenomenon no existing model of planet formation could have predicted.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mu\u00f1oz hopes to change that by building a small but growing sample of eccentric warm Jupiters using NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and basing new models and existing model updates on what he finds.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe data tells us that warm Jupiters are not just the tail end of hot Jupiters,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said. \u201cIt tells us they may have a different history. We need to understand if this is just a quirk\u2014if these are pathological cases that happen maybe once every million cases\u2014or if there is an additional physical process that we have ignored in the past that we might be able to unveil.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Knowing what processes are at work during an eccentric warm Jupiter\u2019s formation could help astronomers uncover hidden truths about our solar system\u2019s evolution and the creation of countless others just like it. But before diving into the implications, Mu\u00f1oz has to interrogate multiple hypotheses until he can find one that is practical and plausible.<\/span><\/p>\n

One possibility is that these eccentric warm Jupiters have companion planets that somehow alter their orbits without misaligning them relative to their stars\u2019 equator. Having varying eccentricities and varying inclinations simultaneously is well understood from a modeling perspective, but having one and not the other is not as easily explained.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another concerns the gaseous nebulas in which the planets and their stars formed. Mu\u00f1oz reasons that these planets could have interacted with their surroundings in ways astronomers could never have anticipated as they were developing. Discoveries of this nature could permanently change the way astronomers map planet formation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last, and Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s favorite, is the idea that the stars in these systems are responsible. Because stars are fluid bodies, they can develop internal waves that can sometimes crash and extract energy from a planet\u2019s orbit in peculiar ways. He said it’s mathematically feasible that these waves could also be the reason warm Jupiters align so closely with their host stars\u2019 equators.<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer to which theory is correct, as of now, is a mystery, but it\u2019s one Mu\u00f1oz will be hard at work solving with myriad modeling techniques.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a theorist, so I work on models using heavy-duty computers, pencil-and-paper calculations and anything in between,\u201d Mu\u00f1oz said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a model that predicted this to begin with, so we\u2019re going to go crazy and dive into the most creative ways we can think about this problem. But once you have a mathematical model, that is just the beginning.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Next year, Mu\u00f1oz will hire a graduate student who excels in creative puzzle solving to assist him throughout his modeling study. In the meantime, he said his research into his host star hypothesis has been promising, and he hopes to publish his findings in the near future.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you do when you have an unanticipated astronomical phenomenon, a dataset made of planets thousands of light-years away and theoretical models that fail to explain what exactly you’re looking at?\u00a0 If you’re Diego Mu\u00f1oz, an assistant professor in NAU\u2019s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the answer is simple: You get to work…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":76002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}