When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting its star with very different siblings. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)Using NASA’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets (ASTEP) on the Antarctic Plateau, astronomers have discovered a rare and uniquely weird planetary system.The extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that swirl around the star TOI-201 have orbits that are changing so rapidly that astronomers can see the changes in real time. The behavior of the system, located around 370 light-years from Earth, is something scientists have never seen before.AdvertisementAdvertisementTOI-201 is 1.3 times the mass of the sun and also has a diameter of 1.3 times the size of our home star. The exoplanets that orbit the star include a rocky super-Earth with six times the mass of our planet that has a year lasting just 5.8 Earth-days. Its planetary siblings are a gas giant with half the mass of Jupiter, completing an orbit every 53 days, designated TOI-201b, and another gas giant that has 16 times the mass of Jupiter that completes an orbit every 2,883 days (about 7.9 years).”Most planetary systems appear as ‘peas in a pod,’ meaning the planets have a similar range of parameters and share a similar orbital plane,” team member Amaury Triaud, from the University of Birmingham in the U.K., said in a statement. “This is not the case in the TOI-201 system, which contains three orbiting objects very distinct from one another, and which interact gravitationally.”The team’s results were published on April 15 in the journal Science.This planetary system is going through changesChanges to planetary systems and shifting orbits aren’t unique to TOI-201, but these transformations usually occur on timescales of millions and even billions of years. TOI-201 is different because of the highly flattened or elliptical and tilted orbit of the outer planet, which gravitationally pulls on the inner worlds. This causes shifts in the orientation of the inner planets’ orbits, and changes to the timing of their “transits,” the times in w …
