Musica universalis

The ancient Greeks would relate to this newly discovered six planet system bigtime regarding how the planets orbit their sun is in almost perfect "harmony" as said planets exhibit an elegant orbital resonance that's rare to the nth degree.

By now, we have discovered hundreds of stars with multiple planets orbiting them scattered throughout the galaxy. Each one is unique, but a system orbiting the star HD 158259, 88 light-years away, is truly special.

The star itself is about the same mass and a little larger than the Sun - a minority in our exoplanet hunts. It's orbited by six planets: a super-Earth and five mini-Neptunes.

After monitoring it for seven years, astronomers have discovered that all six of those planets are orbiting HD 158259 in almost perfect orbital resonance. This discovery could help us to better understand the mechanisms of planetary system formation, and how they end up in the configurations we see.

It gets better.

Orbital resonance is when the orbits of two bodies around their parent body are closely linked, as the two orbiting bodies exert gravitational influence on each other. In the Solar System, it's pretty rare in planetary bodies; probably the best example is Pluto and Neptune.

Orbital resonances have also been identified in exoplanets. But each planet orbiting HD 158259 is in an almost 3:2 resonance with the next planet out away from the star, also described as a period ratio of 1.5. That means for every three orbits each planet makes, the next one out completes two.

They're all very tight. Starting closest to the star - the super-Earth, revealed by TESS to be around twice the mass of Earth - the orbits are 2.17, 3.4, 5.2, 7.9, 12, and 17.4 days.

These produce period ratios of 1.57, 1.51, 1.53, 1.51, and 1.44 between each pair of planets. That's not quite perfect resonance - but it's close enough to classify HD 158259 as an extraordinary system.

When one reads this, the notion of Music of the Spheres/musica Universalist and the Greek Modes come to mind as the ancient Greeks were into both concepts in their endless pursuit of trying to understand how reality works at deep level.

The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. This "music" is not thought to be audible, but rather a harmonic, mathematical or religious concept. The idea continued to appeal to scholars until the end of the Renaissance, influencing many kinds of scholars, including humanists. Further scientific exploration discovered orbital resonance in specific proportions in some orbital motion.

Ionian Mode AKA The Major Scale

Take the major natural scale. It corresponds to the first Greek mode, called Ionian mode. We will show you later where this nomenclature came from, don’t worry about that now.

Think Miles Davis and the modes as Kind of Blue, the greatest jazz album of all time,

is based on musical concepts nearly 3000 years old.

The greatest jazz tune ever written.

Read the liner notes on the album penned by Bill Evans, 

which, to me, is the best explanation of what jazz truly is.