Wikipedia says:
LHS 1140 is a red dwarf in the constellation of Cetus…The star is over 5 billion years old and has 15% of the mass of the Sun. LHS 1140’s rotational period is 130 days…LHS 1140 is known to have two confirmed rocky planets orbiting it, and a third candidate planet not yet confirmed.
Planet b was in the media spotlight in 2017:
LHS 1140b: Potentially Habitable Super-Earth Found Orbiting Nearby Red Dwarf – Sci-News.
“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade,” said Dr. Jason Dittmann, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the Nature paper.
. . .
“The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterization of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1,” concluded co-authors Dr. Xavier Delfosse and Dr. Xavier Bonfils, both at the CNRS and IPAG in Grenoble, France.
Let’s take a look at the orbital data after the latest update last week (source: exoplanet.eu):
1140 c orbits in 3.777931 days
1140 b orbits in 24.736 days
275 c = 1038.931 d
42 b = 1038.912 d
Conjunctions per period = 275 – 42 = 233
275 = 55*5
42 = 21*2
2,5,21,55 and 233 are all Fibonacci numbers.
The ratio of one c-b conjunction to 5 c orbits is 1:Phi³(or 233/55).
A final point of interest:
8 rotations of star LHS 1140 = 8*130 = 1040 days, only a day more than the selected orbital period. 8 is also a Fibonacci number.
That raises the question of whether the planetary conjunctions are synchronized with the solar rotation period in this system.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
May 18, 2020 at 01:48PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 