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posted by chromas on Friday July 24 2020, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the brown-giants dept.

Science Magazine:

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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @04:18PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @04:18PM (#1025825)

    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)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 24 2020, @04:31PM (#1025836) Journal

    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.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 24 2020, @04:38PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday July 24 2020, @04:38PM (#1025839) Journal

      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.

      Reduced imaging data on TYC 8998-760-1. We present four different epochs on the target that were collected in H, Ks, L′, and M′ band, respectively. For the SPHERE data, an unsharp mask is applied; the NACO results are reduced with ADI and the main principal component subtracted. All images are presented with an arbitrary logarithmic colour scale to highlight off-axis point sources. Proper motion analysis proves that all objects north of the star are background (bg) contaminants, while the object south-west of TYC 8998-760-1 (highlighted by the white arrow) is co-moving with its host. This claim is supported by the very red colour of this object compared to the other point sources in the field. In the lower left of the each figure we present the reduced non-coronagraphic flux image at the same spatial scale and field orientation. For all images north points up and east towards the left.

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