The planet was visible back then but discarded for being too faint. The real kicker, though, was an observation taken two decades earlier as part of a different project. Follow up in 2021 confirmed the planet’s existence. Markus Janson (Stockholm University, Sweden) and colleagues discovered the planet in observations taken in 2019 as part of the B-star Exoplanet Abundance Study (BEAST), using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The discovery, published in the December 9th Nature, challenges our notions of how planets form. While Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun is five times wider than Earth’s, this planet is 100 times farther out, circling its star at 560 times the average Earth-Sun distance. The other bright dot in the image (top right) is a background star.Īstronomers have imaged a giant planet around a massive pair of stars known as b Centauri.
The planet, visible as a bright dot in the lower right of the frame, is a super-Jupiter that orbits the pair at 560 a.u. The bright and dark rings around it are imaging artifacts. The duo, which have a total mass of at least six Suns, is the bright object in the top left corner of the image. This is the first time astronomers have directly observed a planet orbiting a star pair this massive.
This image shows the massive binary system known as b Centauri and its giant planet, b Centauri (AB)b.
0 kommentar(er)
