Astronomers know of thousands of planets around other stars, yet only a handful have been imaged directly. The existence of the rest is inferred by how they affect their stars.
Now the world's largest optical telescope has directly spied a new planetary system—the first time more than one planet has been imaged around a star like our Sun. Astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the Sun-like star TYC 8998-760-1, 300 light-years from Earth. Using the VLT's Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument, which is equipped with an optical mask called a coronagraph to block out a star's light, they were able to see two planets orbiting it [pictured here], as reported today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Some light from the star can be seen in the image above (center left) as well as the two giant planets (right) and a scattering of background stars.
The star system is very young at 17 million years old.
Also at AstronomyNow.
Journal Reference:
Alexander J. Bohn, Matthew A. Kenworthy, Christian Ginski, et al. Two Directly Imaged, Wide-orbit Giant Planets around the Young, Solar Analog TYC 8998-760-1 - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aba27e)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @04:18PM (2 children)
If I’m reading that picture right (could use labels), then the planets are not in the elliptic and do not pass in front of the star. So how did they originally find it as the planets would not dim the star’s light
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 24 2020, @04:31PM (1 child)
Those are directly imaged exoplanets. They were totally unknown before the Very Large Telescope was pointed at the star.
However the big 14 Jupiter mass one (which could be a brown dwarf) had already been detected from 2017-2019 using the same instrument.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/492/1/431/5680498 [oup.com]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.04284 [arxiv.org]
Here's the image [oup.com] from that paper.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 24 2020, @04:38PM
I found the older paper from here: http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/tyc_8998-760-1_b/ [exoplanet.eu]
They can tell it's planetary/companion by tracking the slight motion of it orbiting the star, vs. background stars which appear stationary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]