TORONTO – Astronomers seeking to unlock the mysteries of our solar system believe that they have found a planet that is essentially a baby portrait of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
The planet, 51 Eridani b, was discovered by the new Gemini Planet Imager (GIP), an instrument that is operated by international astronomers.
Spotting an exoplanet is no easy task. You can see how hard for yourself: turn on a light bulb (don’t look directly at it!) and have someone put something the size of a pea just in front of it. Stand back about four metres. The glare from the light obscures the pea.
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So astronomers have various techniques that aren’t dependent on visual observations. One is using special telescopes to measure the minute difference in light output as a planet passes in front of its host star, called a transit. This is how the Kepler Space Telescope finds exoplanets.
The GIP, however, uses a different method. It actually searches for the light being emitted from planets, called direct imaging. This is done by sharpening the image of the star, then blocking out that light.
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“51 Eri is one of the best stars for imaging young planets,” said co-author Eric Nielsen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and the SETI Institute. “It’s one of the very youngest stars this close to the Sun. 51 Eri was born 20 million years ago, 40 million years after the dinosaurs died out.”
That 20 million-year-old star is quite young, and that’s what made detecting the planet possible. That’s because the material that coalesces to form planets releases energy and heats up.
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GIP is so sensitive that it was able to spot the exoplanet that is three million times fainter than its star.
51 Eri b is very different than other previously discovered exoplanets: orbiting at a distance roughly the same as that of Saturn around our sun, it’s the lowest mass planet discovered to date and is also one of the coldest at -800 F. So far the typical temperature of a planet is 1,200 F. It also has a strong methane signature, whereas past Jupiter-like planets only had trace amounts.
Astronomers hope that continued observations using the GIP will lead to a better understanding of how our solar system formed.
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