MOVING RIGHT ALONG: The first visible-light image of what appears to be a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. In this composite, the object's position in 2004 [below] and in 2006 [above] follows its projected counterclockwise orbit [green lines].
Image: Courtesy of Paul Kalas, University of California, Berkeley
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Two groups of researchers searching for extrasolar planets—planets orbiting stars other than our own sun—laid claim today to an astronomy milestone: photographing extrasolar planets directly, rather than inferring their presence through effects on their parent stars.
A team led by astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, detected a planetary candidate orbiting Fomalhaut, a star 25 light-years away in the constellation Pisces Australis (the Southern Fish), using visible-light observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Another group, led by astronomer Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, used infrared to image a family of three planets orbiting HR 8799, a star nearly 130 light-years distant. (Marois was also a member of Kalas's group.) Both teams report their findings online today in the journal Science.
Of the more than 300 other known exoplanets, all have been detected indirectly by their effects on their parent stars—either a wobble in induced by the object's orbit or a decrease in detected light from the star as the planet passes in front of it. Other photographed objects have been too massive to be conclusively labeled planets, falling instead into the brown dwarf category (objects about eight to 80 Jupiters in size that lack sufficient mass to ignite hydrogen fusion in their cores, thereby never becoming true stars); have been found to themselves orbit brown dwarfs rather than stars; or have not been shown to be gravitationally bound to a star.
"Finally, we now have separate images where you can see, actually see, the planet," says astronomer Mark Marley of the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who did not participate in the research but wrote an article for Science summarizing and analyzing the teams' results. (Marley commented for SciAm.com as a scientist in the field, not as a representative of NASA.) "I've been using the analogy," he says, that "it's like you're in an apartment building and you can hear the people in the next apartment through the walls, so you know they're in there, but now you have opened the door and you can see the people."
Kalas and two of his co-authors, astronomy professor James Graham of U.C. Berkeley and astrophysicist Mark Clampin of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., had ventured in 2005 that Fomalhaut should harbor planet-size objects in its orbit, based on the disk of dust ringing the star. "At that time we hypothesized that there should be a planet shaping the ring," Kalas says. By looking at Hubble images from 2004 and 2006, Kalas and his colleagues were able to track a speck, dubbed Fomalhaut b, inside that ring that seemed to be orbiting the star.
"When you look at Fomalhaut b, its location is consistent with where we expected to find a planet, interior to the dust ring, and it shows orbital motion—and that's also encouraging," he says. "If this speck of dust had moved in a different direction between 2004 and 2006, we wouldn't believe that it was associated with Fomalhaut."
Fomalhaut b is significant for its small size, estimated to be between the mass of Neptune and three times the mass of Jupiter, which would place it squarely in the realm of planets. An object larger than about 13 Jupiter-masses is considered a small brown dwarf rather than a large planet. "The upper bound to Fomalhaut b is unprecedented," Kalas says. "Our upper bound definitively excludes that Fomalhaut b is a brown dwarf or a star." The planet, he says, "can't possibly be more than three Jupiter-masses," because a more massive object would clear its gravitational sphere of debris, meaning that the dust belt would have to be farther away than it is.
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10 Comments
Add CommentI disagree that these amazing images can be characterized as "the first" images of exoplanets. What about 2M1207b, which is smaller than a brown dwarf? Or the planet of 1RXS J160929.1-210524, another relatively low-mass object? I wrote an article (http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/11698.aspx) on images taken of these two objects a month ago. The first image is about four years old and the newer one is from earlier this year. Did you miss something, SciAm, or are you disputing that these masses qualify as planets?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAwesome pics, but I sure am glad that someone else caught that comment. What about the previous exoplanets?!?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Ginko100: don't be surprised 2M1207b is ignored, it's just because it was discovered at ESO, not by an US astronomer ! That kind of things happens. By the way, I liked your article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen are we going to see hubble shots of Zeti Reticuli? Why aren't there any?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould it be possible, or has it been confirmed that thare are any planets around the Zeta Retuculum star, as claimed by Betty & Barney Hill in 1961 ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction#.22Deciphering.22_the_star_map
With all this high powered technology, when will we get confirmation if there are any plantes around Zeta Reticulum as claimed by Betty & Barnie Hill in 1961 ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction#.22Deciphering.22_the_star_map
how is it that not one reputable scientist has the guts to admit that we have ongoing, one-on-one, proven, civilian et contact. Try www.thayfly.com. for the real exo-planets news and science, instead of these Govt controlled, highly censored so called Journals tidbits of misinformation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf they actually do look at Zeta Reticuli, a bunch of right-wing numbskulls will cry how its a waste of taxpayer money, and use that as a reason to slash NASA's budget. Remember how many times McCane kept whining about that million-dollar projector for a planetarium?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProbably because "in addition to the stunning, still irreproducible physical evidence, Meier has single-handedly transcribed more than 24,000 pages of information," makes Biller Meier nearly as credible as Richard Hoagland, who has absolutely zero credibility outside of those who wear tinfoil hats and talk about black gov't shush-copters performing mind-control operations on the general population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the evidence is "still irreproducible" it probably means it's fake. Funny how the website actually spins this little tidbit as something that gives it credence.
Ungolythe expsoes himself as a misniformer by insulting those that accept the work of Meier and Hoagland.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this6 US ivestigators spent 5 years on and off with Meier in Switzerland during the time of the main et contacts, in a serious effort to debuk hum. They faiked to do so and ended up confirming his et contacts.
They then published Light Years by Gary Kinder, the events of of the itnvestigation.
One of the Meier`s support group, GuidoMossbrugger pubished Amd yet..They Fly, with many Meier photos.
Of the 1000 plus Kodak color pre-photo-shop photos that Meier took, approx 100 were anaylysed by JPL in CA. USA. They confirm a solid, metallic, energised, object in the distance.
One analysis shows a beamship in the close proximity of a Swiss AF Mirage jet fighter, with an energy field from the beamship enveloping the jet fighter. This incident is recorded in the contact notes of Meier, with the ers. (1600 pages translated to English and published by Wendel Stevens USAF Intel Rtd, (another tin-hat)?
The et pilot confirmed that the fighter had just locked on its firing control to the beamship, and the beamsip pilot had to neutralize that mechanism at that instant.
Metal fragments of the beamship hu
ll cnstruction stages given to meier by the ets, were analysed by the then top IBM scientist Marcel Vogel, inventor of the computor disk, (and dayglo colors)!
In the videoed analysis, Vogel found metals of absolute purity bonded to other metals also of absolute purity in a process unknown-on earth.
The millions who accept these visits to be factual ignore the tinhat insults, and the screams of fraud from various quachbusting sites.
How arrogant to think that we are alone in this massive universe,