The 14 Herculis System: Eccentric, Strange, and Violent
Using Gaia and twenty years of radial velocity measurements, two brown dwarfs were found orbiting 14 Her in highly eccentric, misaligned orbits.
Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History led a study of this particular system, nearly 60 light-years away from our own, because it has an almost Sun-like star and is relatively nearby. It’s been studied for over two decades. But new data from ESA’s Gaia telescope combined with existing data from their Hipparcos mission provided evidence for a significant amount of acceleration in the motion of the star. The time difference between the two measurements was about 24 years, and the motions of the star differed by 31 sigma. That simply means that the star’s motion is being perturbed by some type of unseen mass. Co-author Dr. Jackie Faherty notes: Finding that a star is accelerating when it has a planet is a big red flag that there is science to be uncovered.
So the team dug through all the literature they could find on this star and managed to gather twenty years of radial velocity data. Using open-source code called ‘orvara’, they combined all the measurements and managed to create a detailed architectural picture of the entire system.
