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Planets in habitable zones: A study of the binary Gamma Cephei

By SpaceRef Editor
January 4, 2003
Filed under , ,

Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0211289


From: Rudolf Dvorak <dvorak@astro.univie.ac.at>
Date (v1): Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:50:25 GMT (101kb)
Date (revised v2): Mon, 18 Nov 2002 12:24:52 GMT (101kb)
Date (revised v3): Fri, 29 Nov 2002 14:38:22 GMT (85kb)

Planets in habitable zones: A study of the binary Gamma Cephei


Authors:
R. Dvorak (1),
E. Pilat-Lohinger (1),
B. Funk (1),
F. Freistetter (1) ((1) Institute of Astronomy, Vienna, Austria)

Comments: 4 pages, 5 figures, changed 2 references made minor changes due to
referees advice


The recently discovered planetary system in the binary GamCep was studied
concerning its dynamical evolution. We confirm that the orbital parameters
found by the observers are in a stable configuration. The primary aim of this
study was to find stable planetary orbits in a habitable region in this system,
which consists of a double star (a=21.36 AU) and a relatively close (a=2.15 AU)
massive (1.7 Mjup sin i) planet. We did straightforward numerical integrations
of the equations of motion in different dynamical models and determined the
stability regions for a fictitious massless planet in the interval of the
semimajor axis 0.5 AU < a < 1.85 AU around the more massive primary. To confirm
the results we used the Fast Lyapunov Indicators (FLI) in separate
computations, which are a common tool for determining the chaoticity of an
orbit. Both results are in good agreement and unveiled a small island of stable
motions close to 1 AU up to an inclination of about 15 deg (which corresponds
to the 3:1 mean motion resonance between the two planets). Additionally we
computed the orbits of earthlike planets (up to 90 earthmasses) in the small
stable island and found out, that there exists a small window of stable orbits
on the inner edge of the habitable zone in GamCep even for massive planets.

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