Astronomers have captured their best view yet of a planet moving around a star in a far away solar system.
The researchers took a series of images of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b as it circled its host star in the constellation of Pictor, 63 light years from Earth.
The snapshots taken with the Gemini Planet Imaging (GPI) instrument on the Gemini South telescope in Chile shows the planet moving through 1.5 years of its 22-year-long orbit around its parent star.
“This is the first coherent animation of a set of observations that really packages up nicely,” said Max Millar-Blanchaer at the University of Toronto.
The gas giant, discovered in 2008, is 10 to 12 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits as far from its star as Saturn does from the sun. The images, taken between November 2013 and April 2015, show the star on the left hand side, blotted out by the GPI’s coronagraph to reduce its glare. The planet is viewed side-on in its orbit.
Though Beta Pictoris b is the only planet in the distant star system, it shares the region of space with comets, orbting gas clouds, and a vast, broad ring of debris that would stretch from Neptune outwards to nearly 2,000 times the sun-Earth distance were it in our home solar system.
The observations, published in the Astrophysical Journal, show that the exoplanet’s orbit is inclined slightly too much for it to pass directly in front of its star as viewed from Earth.
Astronomers have located more than 2000 exoplanets. The vast majority have been detected indirectly, either from the tiny drop in light coming from a star as the planet moves across its face, or from instruments that detect how stars wobble on their axes as planets swing past.
The Gemini Planet Imaging instrument captures pictures of exoplanets directly, an extraordinary achievement given that the alien worlds are often one million times fainter than their parent stars.
