A new study shows that planets can force their host stars to act younger than they are. Some planets seem to slow down the aging process for their stars.
The strongest test yet of the anti-aging property of hot Jupiters is provided by this result, which is the first time it has been documented.
In medicine, you need a lot of patients to enroll in a study to find out if the effects are real or not. This study gives us confidence that hot Jupiters are making the stars they act younger than they are.
A hot Jupiter can cause a star to spin faster if it has a planet like that. The host star can be more active and produce more X-rays as a result of this more rapid rotation.
There are a lot of factors that can affect a star's health. As they get older, all stars will slow their activity and become less active. Figuring out the ages of most stars is difficult because it's not easy to know if a star is young or old because it's close to a planet.
The Chandra study looked at double-star systems where the stars are separated but only one has a hot Jupiter. The stars in a system form at the same time as humans. The separation between the stars is too large for them to have an effect on each other. The star could be used as a control subject.
It's similar to using twins in a study where one twin lives in a different neighborhood that affects their health. We can study the behavior of the same-aged stars by comparing them to a nearby planet.
The team used the amount of X-rays to figure out how old a star is. They studied almost three dozen systems in X-rays and found evidence of planet-to-star influence. The stars with hot Jupiters were more active than their companions without hot Jupiters.
"In previous cases there were some very intriguing hints, but now we have statistical evidence that some planets influence their stars and keep them young," said co-author Marzieh Hosseini. Future studies will help to understand this effect.
The results were described in a paper published in the monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper is available on the arXiv pre-print server.
The impact of star-planet interaction on stellar activity can be found in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The article was published on the academic.oup.com.
The impact of star-planet interaction on stellar activity can be seen in arXiv. You can find it on thearxiv.2203.13637.
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