An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than Sol. There are many, and many have been photographed, the first good photograph coming from VLT (the Very Large Telescope) array in Chile.
But now, something special; the first planet photographed around a Sol-like star. That is, a star very similar to our own.
The star has a very romantic and endearing name: 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and it’s about 500 light years from us, somewhere in the region of Scorpio. The star is yellow (like Sol) and just a little bit smaller (85% of Sol’s mass). The planet, though, is massive – eight time bigger than Jupiter. And even though it looks close, it’s about 330 times the Earth-Sol distance away from its star.
For a sense of Solar scale, Neptune is about 30 times the distance from Earth to Sol. This planet is ten times further than Neptune is to Sol.
Now, if you look at the photo above, it looks kind of close to its star. That’s because in order to get a picture of the planet, the star had to be overexposed a bit. Well, a lot. The scale gets a bit wacky.
From the Live Science article:
Previously, the only photographed extrasolar planets have belonged to tiny, dim stars known as brown dwarfs. And while hundreds of exoplanets have been detected by noting their gravitational tug on their parent stars, it is rare to find one large enough to image directly.
“This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our sun,” said David Lafrenière, an astronomer at the University of Toronto who led the team that discovered the star. “If we confirm that this object is indeed gravitationally tied to the star, it will be a major step forward.”
Some further reading…
- Watch how the Hubble searches for extrasolar planets
- The first extrasolar planet found, from Space.com
