Multiplanet system around sunlike star photographed for 1st time ever
By Mike Wall - Space.com Senior Writer 13 hours ago
The two newly imaged planets are huge — 14 and 6 times more massive than Jupiter.
For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sunlike star.
The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed two giant planets circling TYC 8998-760-1, a very young analogue of our own sun that lies about 300 light-years from Earth, a new study reports.
"This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our solar system, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution," study lead author Alexander Bohn, a doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in a statement.
The two giant planets in the TYC 8998-760-1 system are visible as two bright dots in the center
(TYC 8998-760-1b) and bottom right (TYC 8998-760-1c) of the frame, noted by arrows. Other
bright dots, which are background stars, are visible in the image as well. By taking different
images at different times, the team was able to distinguish the planets from the background stars.
The image was captured by blocking the light from the young, sunlike star (top-left of center)
using a coronagraph, which allows for the fainter planets to be detected. The bright and dark seen
on the star’s image are optical artifacts. (Image credit: ESO/Bohn et al.)
Before this historic cosmic portrait, only two multiplanet systems had ever been directly imaged, and neither of them features a sunlike star, study team members said. And snapping a photo of even a single exoplanet remains a rare achievement.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/multiplanet-system-sun-like-star-first-photo.html
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