Acta Physica Polonica B

Vol. 35, No. 10, October 2004, page 2473


Testing the Mirror World Hypothesis for the Close-in Extrasolar Planets

R. Foot

Because planets are not expected to be able to form close to stars due to the high temperatures, it has been suggested that the observed close orbiting (\sim 0.05 AU) large mass planets (\sim MJ) might be mirror worlds --- planets composed predominately of mirror matter. The accretion of ordinary matter onto the mirror planet (from e.g. the solar wind from the host star) will make the mirror planet opaque to ordinary radiation with an effective radius Rp. It was argued in a previous paper, {ITALIC Phys. Lett.} {B505}, 1 (2001), that this radius was potentially large enough to explain the measured size of the first transiting close-in extrasolar planet, HD209458b. Furthermore, {ITALIC Phys. Lett.} { B505}, 1 (2001) made the rough prediction: Rp \propto \sqrt {{Ts \over Mp}}, where Ts is the surface temperature of the ordinary matter in the mirror planet and Mp is the mass of the planet (the latter dependence on Mp being the more robust prediction). We compare this prediction with the recently discovered transiting planets, OGLE-TR-56b and OGLE-TR-113b.

PACS numbers: 97.82.--j, 12.60.--i


  Paper (gzipped PostScript  107 KB)
 
Table of Contents Back to Number 10 contents