First Image of a Planet Orbiting a Sun-Like Star

Several readers including houbou and DigitumDei sent links to what may be the first-ever image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star (research paper). The giant planet, the mass of 8 Jupiters, orbits its star at 330 AU, or 11 times the distance to Neptune's orbit. If the imaged object does turn out to be a planet — and it's not certain it is — then theories of planet formation may have to be adjusted. "The bulk of the material from which planets might form is significantly closer to the parent star... The outermost parts of such disks wouldn't contain enough material to assemble a Jupiter-mass planet at the distance from the star... at which the Toronto team found the faint object."

Comments

ARGH!

[Tumbleweed]

Damn you, Google Star View! There IS such a thing as privacy, you know!

Re:ARGH!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case the article will be slashdotted, here's the image:
Planet ----> . O <---- Star

Low-bandwidth version in case of slashdotting

[PeeAitchPee]

O .

Re:First?

[Timothy Brownawell]

Perhaps it's that that star isn't "sun-like"?

Gemini Telescope and guide stars

[wigaloo]

The discovery was made using the 8m diameter Gemini Telescope - North on Mauna Kea. It's doesn't have Hubble's advantage of being in space, and so a clever approach is employed to eliminate interference from atmospheric turbulence. A laser is used to induce fluorescence in the sodium layer left by meteors up around 80 km altitude. -- this is called a "guide star" -- and adaptive (i.e., deformable) optics in the telescope bring the guide star image into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. A guide star is used for this process rather than an actual star because it is much easier to adaptively image a bright object (which can also be positioned where needed). Such a clear image would otherwise not have been possible.

Re:Gemini Telescope and guide stars

[Shag]

Just to flesh this out and offer a few corrections, as someone who works around the AO LGS at Gemini (and Keck):

Tomduck is correct that an adaptive optics (AO) system uses deformable optics to bring a guide star into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. He fails to mention that this process is in no way inherently dependent upon the use of a laser. Indeed, when a bright natural star is close enough to the target to be used, it is in many ways preferable to using the laser. (For one, the brightness of natural stars tends to be pretty constant, and not subject to the usual game of "so, how many watts shy of nominal power are we tonight?" :) So Gemini's AO system, Altair (read all about it here) is quite often used with natural guide stars (NGS).

A NGS can, incidentally, also be used for guiding - keeping the telescope pointed correctly - as its name implies. This isn't the case for a laser guide star (LGS), which in fact has absolutely no use for pointing, since the laser is fastened to, and aligned with, the telescope. It's a horrible misnomer. :( LGS come into play because the field of view of large (8-10m) telescopes is narrow enough that NGS are frequently not visible at the same time as science targets.

There are three large telescopes on Mauna Kea with LGS capabilities - Keck II has an older-technology sodium dye laser (pumped/amped by about six YAGs), Gemini has a solid-state (crystal) laser, and I'm not certain what Subaru has as I haven't worked with them yet. The W.M. Keck Observatory has funding to put a laser on Keck I also, but I'm unsure when it'll be operational. All of the lasers propagate at around 589nm for sodium fluorescence (this is coincidentally about the same frequency put out by the low-pressure sodium streetlights used in the towns on the island, so astronomers can pretty much ignore this frequency).

Each beam is about 8-12W with an objective lens diameter of typically 30-50cm, spreading a little as it goes up. Not enough power to punch holes in stuff, but enough that the FAA requires aircraft spotters to be positioned outside each observatory to make sure they don't blind the pilots of flights between the west coast and Australia/New Zealand. I've done this work sporadically since 2005 at Keck and 2006 at Gemini, so I have tons of pictures and time-lapse video... here's one of the Gemini beam with me ruining the picture by sitting in front of it.

Along with the FAA, AFSC (that's Air Force Space Command, not the American Friends Service Committee) is rather particular about us not shining the bright lights into the sensitive sensors of keyholes and such things. We look up, they look down, etc.

By the way, if there are any Farkers on the Big Island of Hawaii who think this kind of work sounds like fun, it looks like Keck has openings. It's temp-agency work, and probably the coldest, highest-altitude temp-agency work you'll ever get...

All Wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ridiculous! That picture is completely distorted! What paper are you looking at?

It was a lot more like this:

`O

Re:All Wrong!

[windsurfer619]

Or maybe like this?
.
  O

Re:Obligatory

[CorporateSuit]

... that's no moon ...

We've already established that. It's a planet.

Re:Planetary Science

[JackCroww]

Maybe you made a typo, but Neptune orbits at roughly 30 AU from Sol, making Neptune at 1/10th the distance of the exo-planet in the article. Hence the question of WTF is it doing out so far from its primary? However, if it wasn't a typo on your part, you need to bone up on your basic Solar system facts, and your theory about it being a typical planetary system would be dead wrong.

Re:Theories of planet formation may have to be adj

[PhreakOfTime]

1) In the 1700's some French guy starts a list of objects that are in the sky that resemble comets, but are not. They are assumed to be relatively nearby objects. One has the name M31.

2) In the early 1900's some American guy comes along and looks a little closer at those objects, and finds not only are they not nearby, but they are entire islands of stars, and we live in one of those islands too! And M31 ends up being over 2 million light years away.

3) In the later part of the 20th century, an astronomical space based telescope, discovers the background variations in the left overs of the big bang, that led to the eventual location of these things now called 'galaxies'

Charles Messier, Edwin Hubble, and the COBE satellite would like to have a discussion with you about the scientific method.

In other words, yes. The theories on planet formation will change the larger the sample size gets. Just the same way the awareness and eventual theories of galaxies changed as they were observed more often and became part of a larger sample size - the known visible universe

Re:This star must have a high rate of rotation

[Ironchew]

The star was spinning so fast that we all heard a "whoooooosh" through the vast expanse of space.