For the first time, astronomers have directly photographed various planets orbiting a sun-like star.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile photographed two giant planets circling a very young analogue of our own sun that is about 300 light-years from Earth, a new study reports.
“This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our solar system, but at a much earlier stage in its evolution,” study lead author Alexander Bohn, a doctoral student at the University of Washington, said in a statement. Leiden in the Netherlands.
The study was published online Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Related: The Strangest Alien Planets (gallery)
Prior to this historic cosmic portrait, only two systems from various planets had been directly photographed, and none of them feature a sun-like star, study team members said. And taking a photo of even a single exoplanet is still a rare achievement.
“Although astronomers have indirectly detected thousands of planets in our galaxy, only a small fraction of these exoplanets have been directly photographed,” study co-author Matthew Kenworthy, an associate professor at Leiden University, said in the same statement.
Bohn, Kenworthy, and their colleagues studied the 17-million-year-old star with the VLT Spectro-Polarimetric high-contrast exoplanet research instrument, or SPHERE for short. SPHERE uses a device called a coronagraph to block blinding light from a star, allowing astronomers to see and study planets in orbit that would otherwise be lost in the glow.
Recently reported SPHERE images revealed two planets in the system. Astronomers already knew about one, a team led by Bohn announced its discovery late last year, but the other is a newly discovered world.
The two planets are huge and distant. One of the planets is about 14 times more massive than Jupiter and orbits at an average distance of 160 astronomical units (AU), and the smallest planet is six times heavier than Jupiter and is about 320 AU from the host star. An AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun: approximately 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers. For comparison: Jupiter and Saturn orbit our sun at just 5 AU and 10 AU, respectively.
It is unclear if the two planets formed at their current locations or if they were somehow pushed there. Additional observations, including those made by huge future observatories such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), could help solve that mystery, study team members said.
Other questions remain about the system. For example, do the two gas giants have company? Could several rocky planets circulate relatively close to the star, as they do in our solar system?
“The possibility that future instruments, such as those available in the ELT, can detect even lower-mass planets around this star mark an important milestone in the understanding of multi-planet systems, with possible implications for the history of our own solar system” . Bohn said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
