Recalibrating ‘Hot Jupiter’ Migration

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2025-01-16 09:30:03

What catches your eye in this description of an exoplanetary system? Start with a ‘hot Jupiter,’ with a radius 0.87 times that of our Jupiter and an orbit of 7.1 days. This is WASP-132b, confirmed in 2016, and first discovered through the labors of the Wide-Angle Search for Planets program. Subsequent confirmation came through the CORALIE spectrograph installed on the Euler telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla site. This world orbits a K-class star 403 light years out in Lupus.

The CORALIE measurements gave hints of another giant planet in a long period orbit. The system came still further into focus in 2021, when observations from TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) showed a transiting super-Earth with a diameter of 1.8 Earth radii in a tight orbit of 1.01 days. The mass of the planet, as measured by the HARPS spectrograph at La Silla, is six times that of Earth. So we have both a hot-Jupiter and a super-Earth hugging the star, along with an outer gas giant.

Image: The WASP-132 system was known to harbour WASP-132b, here in the foreground, a hot Jupiter planet orbiting around a K-type star in 7.1 days. New data confirms the system has more planets, including an inner super-Earth, here seen transiting in front of the orange host-star. Visible as a pale blue dot near the top right corner is also the giant planet WASP-132d discovered in the outskirts of the system. © Thibaut Roger – Université de Genève.