No, you are not seeing double: This photograph exhibits two pictures of a Jupiter-like planet that orbits the star AF Leporis. The planet has been imaged by two unbiased teams of astronomers utilizing the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Giant Telescope (VLT) in Chile. However why did they aim this specific star?
The 2 teams, led by Dino Mesa (INAF, Italy) and Robert De Rosa (ESO, Chile), studied star catalogs from the European House Company’s Hipparcos and Gaia satellites. Over time, these two space missions have precisely pinpointed the place and movement of stars in our galaxy utilizing astrometry. Planets exert a gravitational tug on their host stars, perturbing their trajectory within the sky. The 2 groups discovered that the star AF Leporis exhibited such a disturbed trajectory, a telltale signal {that a} planet might be hiding there.
As the 2 teams took a better have a look at this method with the VLT, they managed to immediately picture the planet that orbits AF Leporis. They each used the SPHERE instrument, which corrects the blurring brought on by atmospheric turbulence utilizing adaptive optics and likewise blocks the sunshine from the star with a particular masks, revealing the planet subsequent to it. They discovered that the planet is only a few instances extra large than Jupiter, making it the lightest exoplanet detected with the mixed use of astrometric measurements and direct imaging.
The AF Leporis system shares comparable options to our solar system. The star has roughly the identical mass, measurement and temperature because the sun, and the planet orbits it at a distance just like that between Saturn and the sun. The system additionally has a particles belt with comparable traits because the Kuiper belt. For the reason that AF Leporis system is simply 24 million years previous—about 200 instances youthful than the sun—additional research of this method can make clear how our personal solar system was fashioned.
Scientific articles are accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Extra info:
D. Mesa et al, AF Lep b: the bottom mass planet detected coupling astrometric and direct imaging information, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2302.06213
Robert J. De Rosa et al, Direct imaging discovery of a super-Jovian across the younger Solar-like star AF Leporis, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2302.06332
Quotation:
Recognizing a hidden exoplanet (2023, February 22)
retrieved 22 February 2023
from https://phys.org/information/2023-02-hidden-exoplanet.html
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