Planets On May 17, 2006, a team of astronomers using the
European Southern Observatory's (ESO)
HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre
La Silla telescope in the
Atacama Desert,
Chile, announced the discovery of three
extrasolar planets orbiting the star. With
minimum masses between 10 and 18 times that of the
Earth, all three planets are presumed to be similar to the planets
Neptune or
Uranus. A 2026 study, however, found that the radial velocity signal of planet c is likely correlated with
stellar activity indicators, suggesting that the planet might not exist. The star rotates at an inclination of 13 degrees relative to Earth. It has been assumed that the planets share that inclination. However b and c are "hot Neptunes", and outside this system several are now known to be oblique relative to the stellar axis. The outermost planet discovered appears to be within the system's
habitable zone, where liquid water would remain stable (more accurate data on the primary star's luminosity will be required to know for sure where the habitable zone is). HD 69830 is the first extrasolar planetary system around a Sun-like star without any known planets comparable to
Jupiter or
Saturn in
mass. The planetary parameters were updated in 2023.
Debris disk In 2005, the
Spitzer Space Telescope detected a debris disk in the HD 69830 system consistent with being produced by an
asteroid belt twenty times more massive than that in our own system. The belt was originally thought to be located inside an orbit equivalent to that of
Venus in the
Solar System, which would place it between the orbits of the second and third planets. The disk contains sufficient quantities of dust that the nights on any nearby planets would be lit up by
zodiacal light 1000 times brighter than that seen on
Earth, easily outshining the
Milky Way. Further analysis of the spectrum of the dust in 2007 revealed that it is composed of highly processed material, likely derived from a disrupted rocky
asteroid of at least 30 km radius which contained many small olivine-rich (rocky) and once-wet grains which would not survive at close distances to the star. Instead, it seems more likely that the asteroid belt producing the dust is located outside the orbit of the outermost planet, around 1 AU from the star. This region contains the 2:1 and 5:2 mean motion resonances with HD 69830 d. == Gallery ==