Monday, 15 September 2008

A long way away

This latest discovery from a team using the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea is cool, literally. Cool as in 1) the object they've discovered is too cool to be a star or even a brown dwarf, and 2) this may well be the first planet orbiting another star that's been imaged from Earth - and at 500 light years away it's quite a distance from us!

It's going to take a little while to confirm that the planet, which is about eight times more massive than Jupiter, is actually part of this star's solar system and that the team haven't been horribly unlucky with a line-of-sight effect (it's happened before though); I assume they'll be measuring the star and planet's proper motion to confirm they are gravitationally bound. (Proper motion is just a clever name for an object's angular movement in the sky).

What's strange, if indeed it is confirmed that the planet is orbiting the star, is how large an orbit the planet has as it's much further away from its parent star than one would expect using our own solar system as a model, yet the star is not dissimilar from our own. I guess it could be a captured object but that would be very unlikely, although we do know there are free-floating brown dwarfs out there.

Just as the recently newsworthy LHC is probably going to lead to some new physics, so are the stunning observations that modern telescopes are making all of the time now.

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