Orbit and Mass
Gliese 876 b is in a 1:2:4 Laplace resonance with the inner planet Gliese 876 c and the outer planet Gliese 876 e: in the time it takes planet e to complete one orbit, planet b completes two and planet c completes four. This is the second known example of a Laplace resonance, the first being Jupiter's moons Io, Europa and Ganymede. As a result, the orbital elements of the planets change fairly rapidly as they dynamically interact with one another. The planet's orbit has a low eccentricity, similar to the planets in our solar system. The semimajor axis of the orbit is only 0.208 AU, less than that of Mercury in our solar system. However Gliese 876 is such a faint star that this puts it in the outer part of the habitable zone.
A limitation of the radial velocity method used to detect Gliese 876 b is that only a lower limit on the planet's mass can be obtained. This lower limit is around 1.93 times the mass of Jupiter. The true mass depends on the inclination of the orbit, which in general is unknown. However because Gliese 876 is only 15 light years from Earth Benedict et al. (2002) were able to use one of the Fine Guidance Sensors on the Hubble Space Telescope to detect the astrometric wobble created by Gliese 876 b. This constituted the first unambiguous astrometric detection of an extrasolar planet. Their analysis suggested that the orbital inclination is 84°±6° (close to edge-on). In the case of Gliese 876 b, modelling the planet-planet interactions from the Laplace resonance shows that the actual inclination of the orbit is 59°, resulting in a true mass of 2.2756 times the mass of Jupiter.
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