The Cervantes system

Cervantes is a G3IV-V yellow subgiant in Ara, 50.59 ly away, with 4 known planets. Their orbits run from 0.0952 to 4.17 AU. All of them were detected by radial velocity.

27 AUG 2026 17:41 UTC

ACROSS

Seen from above the orbital plane, on a linear scale — the star is at a focus of every ellipse rather than in the middle of it, and on any other radial scale these would stop being ellipses. This is not the view from Earth: from here the system is edge-on, which for most of them is how they were found. The planets turn anticlockwise. 3 of the 4 planets are at the position their published period and epoch give for the instant on the clock, to within the 8.3 minutes by which a barycentric date and a wall clock can differ. 3 orbits are drawn as an ellipse, from a measured eccentricity and a published argument of periastron. One orbit is dated and carries no planet anyway: its epoch is far enough back that the published uncertainty in its period has accumulated past a quarter of a turn, so which part of the orbit the planet is on is not known. The green band is where a planet would receive between 0.53 and 1.1 times the sunlight Earth does. It is a distance, not a verdict.

Distances are semi-major axes in astronomical units on a logarithmic axis — the outermost orbit here is 44 times the innermost, which a linear axis would flatten into the star. Planet discs are on their own scale, by cube root of radius, because at the orbital scale every one of them is smaller than a pixel. The band is where a planet would receive between 0.53 and 1.1 times the sunlight Earth does, computed from the star’s luminosity and nothing else — it is a distance, not a verdict about any world in it.

[

THE PLANETS

] 4, INNERMOST FIRST

PLANET

ORBIT (AU)

PERIOD

RADIUS

MASS

EQUILIBRIUM T

[

WHAT THIS PAGE IS

] AND IS NOT

Every figure here is the NASA Exoplanet Archive’s composite parameter for that planet — one consistent set per world, not the best number for each column from a different paper. Semi-major axes are orbits about the star, not distances from Earth; the system as a whole is 50.59 ly away.

The band on the diagram is a distance and not a verdict. It is where a planet would receive between 0.53 and 1.1 times the sunlight Earth does, from a luminosity of 1.88 L☉. It says nothing about whether anything in it has an atmosphere, water, a magnetic field or a stable star.

Discovery order and orbital order are different things. Planets are lettered b, c, d in the order they were found, and this table is ordered by semi-major axis instead — which is why the letters on many of these pages are out of sequence.

The plan view at the top puts the planets where their published elements say they are, and there is one thing it deliberately cannot show: which way the whole system is tilted. The inclinations the archive publishes are measured against the plane of the sky, one per planet, and there is no longitude of the ascending node for any planet in this catalogue — so the view perpendicular to the orbits is the only one that needs nothing invented. What that costs is the view from Earth, which for most of these systems is very nearly edge-on, because a system seen any other way does not transit and would never have been found.