In the News:
"
Early exit for hot Jupiter due to deadly tides"
Quote:
Bad news for planet hunters: most of the "hot Jupiters" that astronomers have been searching for in star clusters were likely destroyed long ago by their stars.
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In general, Debes and Jackson's model predicts that one-third of the hot Jupiters will be destroyed by the time a cluster is a billion years old, which is still juvenile compared to our solar system (about 4-1/2 billion years old). 47 Tuc has recently been estimated to be more than 11 billion years old. At that age, the researchers expect more than 96% of the hot Jupiters to be gone.
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If the tidal orbital decay model proves right, Debes adds, planet hunting in clusters may become even harder. "The big, obvious planets may be gone, so we'll have to look for smaller, more distant planets," he explains. "That means we will have to look for a much longer time at large numbers of stars and use instruments that are sensitive enough to detect these fainter planets."
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Hmm .. perhaps a slowing down in the rate of discoveries of gas giant exoplanets ?
Cheers
