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April 5, 2019
Research Highlight
Exiled Planet Linked to Stellar Flyby 3 Million Years Ago
![Two binary stars, now far apart, skated by one another 2-3 million years ago, leaving a smoking gun: a disordered planetary system (left).](/uploads/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public/be/87/be87ea67-73a3-440d-89af-542cc01bbd2a/binarystarflyby750.jpg__1240x510_q85_subject_location-375%2C250_subsampling-2.jpg)
Two binary stars, now far apart, skated by one another 2-3 million years ago, leaving a smoking gun: a disordered planetary system (left).Image credit: UC Berkeley.
From the University of California at Berkeley:
Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system — an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists, a possible Planet Nine far from the sun — have been linked to the close approach of another star in our system’s infancy that flung things helter-skelter.
But are stellar flybys really capable of knocking planets, comets and asteroids askew, reshaping entire planetary systems?
UC Berkeley and Stanford University astronomers think they have now found a smoking gun.
A planet orbiting a young binary star may have been perturbed by another pair of stars that skated too close to the system between 2 and 3 million years ago, soon after the planet formed from a swirling disk of dust and gas.
Click here to read the full press release from UC Berkeley.
The study, “A Near-coplanar Stellar Flyby of the Planet Host Star HD 106906,” was published in The Astronomical Journal. The work was supported by the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS).  NExSS is a NASA  research coordination network supported in part by the  NASA Astrobiology Program. This program element is shared between NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) and the Astrophysics Division.